


luminous beings are we

by neverfadingrain



Series: luminous verse [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Daemons, F/M, M/M, Multi, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, in which i break all the rules of daemon fic and really don't care, you hate the first order already? get ready to hate them a lot more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:18:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5747602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfadingrain/pseuds/neverfadingrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn learns what it means to have a daemon. The First Order left a lot of things out, it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. unnamed

**Author's Note:**

> okay, everybody bear with me here; i know what this looks like, and i swear to you i (mostly) know what i'm doing. i fully intend to fix everything i've broken. as always, many thanks and delightful surprises to haley, kate and zoe for both the beta and listening to me ramble about this for hours on end!
> 
> i cannot take credit for the idea that first order daemons don't have names--i have shamelessly borrowed it from [this](http://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/136148110570/how-about-a-his-dark-materials-au-for-the-poe/) lovely fic. to that author: i hope you don't mind me embellishing on your idea, because your writing was such an inspiration and after i read that i couldn't not write my own au!
> 
> as always, a running list of names and meanings at the bottom!

 

“FN-2187,” Captain Phasma says, “You will submit your blaster for inspection and report to my division immediately for reconditioning.”

A cold shiver runs down FN-2187’s spine, competing for attention with the churning in his gut and the sweat beading on his forehead. “Yes, Captain!” he says, when all he really wants to do is run as fast and as far as he can in the opposite direction. Not reconditioning, please no, anything but reconditioning.

She pauses. “And who said you could take off your helmet?”

The menace in the question threatens to strangle him. FN-2187—Eight-Seven—forces his back straight, taking a couple more deep breaths. “Sorry, Captain!” He jams the helmet back over his head, but waits until Captain Phasma has grunted her approval and left the hangar bay entirely before he descends the shuttle ramp again.

For a moment, all Eight-Seven can see are long snaking lines of fellow troopers rushing to their next destination. Most of them are heading to the showers, then on to their barracks for an off-shift and sleep. He wants to join them, but doesn’t dare. Instead, he forces his feet to take him down three floors to the quartermaster, leaving his blaster behind, and on to the Reconditioning Unit.

It’s the first time he’s had to go under these circumstances, but Eight-Seven knows what’s coming. The stories circulate rapidly, incentive and deterrent alike. Anyone who steps out of line is swiftly reprimanded, and the First Order employs their greatest leverage to devastating effect. Being sent to Reconditioning is the greatest fear of any trooper.

When FN-2187 arrives, he has to take one, two deep breaths before he can key the door open and step inside. The Reconditioning Unit is just as sterile and cold as the rest of the _Finalizer,_ but there’s a certain menacing gloom that isn’t present anywhere else. He shivers, fighting the urge to turn and run.

The silver contraption in the middle of the main room glints ominously. Eight-Seven steers well clear of it, every line of his body carefully contained so as not to telegraph his fear. Captain Phasma is waiting for him in the doorway to the kennels, disapproval telegraphed in every gleaming edge of her chrome armor. Three other troopers are already in the room, preparing.

Most troopers only need reconditioning once in their lifetime. It’s not a hard lesson—you obey orders, no exceptions.

Captain Phasma waves him into the kennel, and Eight-Seven steps forward with his heart in his throat. “You have ten minutes,” she says. Row upon row of polished steel cages line the walls, varying in size with the smallest on top. It’s deadly silent inside, only the barest rustle of feathers or scrape of claws to indicate that the cages are occupied.

The troopers have unlocked one of the cages at about eye level, a foot tall and two feet wide. One drags the dæmon within out by the scruff of her neck, dropping her unceremoniously to the floor. Eight-Seven’s gut clenches, a phantom hand clenching on the nape of his own neck, and he staggers forward without a second thought. Rather detachedly, he notices that the ever-present pain that blankets his life has faded into a low background thrum. His knees hit the floor, hard.

The dæmon is small—maybe a foot and a half high, whipcord thin and covered in sleek gray fur. Her head is triangular, pointed ears pinned back in outrage, whip-like tail lashing the air. Eight-Seven had snuck onto the computers at the training academy, back when she had first settled, to figure out what kind of animal she was. A dwarf vornskr, a vicious canine predator from a world Eight-Seven had never heard of.

 _Oh,_ she says. Her voice is low and velvety, the scrape of a growl hiding underneath.

A second later, Eight-Seven has his hands full of fur, all aggression leaching out of the dæmon. _Hello again,_ he mumbles. It’s been a month and a half since he’s seen her.

 _You have to leave. I don’t know what you did, but you’re not safe,_ she says, pressing her lean body into his hands. Warmth blooms between them, as it always does on the rare occasions FN-2187 is allowed to reach out and touch. Usually, there is a cold metal cage between them. The opportunity to run his hands over her angular head and bony spine, while nice, isn’t worth a repeat of his failure on Jakku. _I heard Phasma talking before you got here; she wants to make an example of us._

 _An example?_ he says. He doesn’t understand.

The dæmon’s whip-like tail lashes the air around them. Eight-Seven is keenly aware of Phasma’s eyes on them, watching, assessing. He cannot slip up again.

_So that all the other troopers can see what happens when you forget your training._

Eight-Seven feels cold down to the very marrow of his bones. He knows what she’s talking about now, remembers witnessing a very similar example when he was still at the training academy. The Separation machine in the main room—Phasma wants to use it. On them.

 _Did she say when?_ he whispers.

The dæmon shakes her finely-boned head. _Soon. Tomorrow, maybe. Once you’ve cleaned yourself up from the reconditioning._

Kriff. He hasn’t forgotten, not really—no one ever forgets what reconditioning is, what it means—but for just a moment Eight-Seven had gotten caught up in the sick creeping dread of what further horrors Captain Phasma might be visiting on them, and the imminent threat had paled in comparison. Now it flares up again, stronger than ever.

 _What should we do?_ he asks, because it’s too much, this is all too much. FN-2187 has never had to consider what he would do in this situation, because he hadn’t ever thought he’d be _in_ this situation. But he doesn’t want to kill for the First Order, and he doesn’t want to end up at the bottom of a disposal chute. He doesn’t want the dæmon trembling between his palms to disappear.

Despite the distance enforced between them, there _is_ a connection there. Eight-Seven can feel it. The First Order hasn’t stamped it out entirely.

Her tail whips around again, agitatedly, and coils around his gauntleted wrist. _Leave,_ she says again. _Get away from this place, get as far as you can and never look back._

 _What about you?_ Eight-Seven asks. There is zero chance that he can break her out of the kennel. And even if he managed that, there’s still the matter of getting them off the _Finalizer_ alive. The only humans on board who are allowed dæmons at their sides are the officers. A Stormtrooper with a dæmon trotting at his heels, even a small one, is going to draw more attention than Eight-Seven knows what to do with.

She gives the best canine approximation of a shrug. Her eyes are dark with knowledge. Worried. _Leave me here. What can they do to me that they haven’t done already?_

He hesitates.

A cold nose nudges his palm, where the leather glove leaves his skin bare. _At least this way, one of us will be free._

“Your time is up, FN-2187,” Captain Phasma’s voice intrudes. She gestures to her troopers, who step forward and unceremoniously haul the dæmon away from Eight-Seven. A wordless noise of protest leaves him when a hand clamps down on the dæmon’s scruff, and then his head is reeling from a swift backhand strike. “You will watch,” Phasma tells him sternly.

Two of the troopers take up positions behind him on either side, forcing him to stay on his knees with unyielding hands. The remaining trooper deposits the dæmon in the middle of the room, well away from both Eight-Seven and the minimal shelter afforded by the cages. He uncoils a whip and flicks it, testing the strength of the lash. Experimentally, methodically. The dæmon cowers on the cold metal floor, staring desperately at Eight-Seven.

Sick fear churns in his gut.

The whip comes down again, this time with intent, and again. The dæmon howls.

 

\--

 

 Two hours later, once Phasma is assured the lesson has sunk in, the dæmon is locked back in the cage to lick her wounds and FN-2187 is ushered out of the kennel. Eight-Seven can still feel the phantom pain of lashes raining down on his back, and his hands won’t stop shaking. He looks back at the eerily silent kennel once on his way out, thankful that his helmet masks the longing expression on his face.

Phasma stops him just outside the main door to the Reconditioning Unit. “You have the next shift off. Make yourself presentable again, FN-2187. You will report back here at 0900 hours tomorrow morning.”

He tenses like he’s just been struck by lightning. Kriff, the dæmon had been right.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Dismissed,” Phasma says, and steps back enough to let the doors swish closed in his face. Eight-Seven stands there blinking for a moment, trying to pull himself together enough to return to the barracks without drawing attention. When he finally feels like he can manage it, he turns on his heel and walks away.

Other Stormtroopers—his brothers—march purposefully through the halls. Normally the sight of the familiar white armor is reassuring, proof that he is surrounded by others who understand. Now, however, every passing brother makes Eight-Seven feel more and more alone. His skin crawls and sweat trickles down his neck.

Eight-Seven’s path takes him past the interrogation block. He cringes unexpectedly at the pained yells that echo through the blast doors, feeling the ghostly sensation of a whip cracking down on his back. The only prisoner aboard the _Finalizer_ right now is the one they’d taken on Jakku, the one who had talked back to Kylo Ren and rambled endlessly at the Stormtroopers guarding him on the shuttle flight off planet.

Kylo Ren had called him the best pilot in the Resistance.

Strange, how the monstrous enemy Eight-Seven has been told to hate his entire life screams just like anyone else. That enemy now has a face and a voice, neither monstrous at all. So fresh after his own punishment, the pilot’s screams do nothing but make him question who the monster really is.

Hurrying now, eager to return to the barracks at last, Eight-Seven turns the matter over in his mind. He keeps puzzling through it as he strips and takes a perfunctory sonic shower, washing the sand and grime of Jakku away, picks at the pieces of the problem while he rubs a cloth over every inch of his armor until it shines like new, and finally a solution comes to him.

FN-2187 needs to get off of the _Finalizer_ tonight. There are no shuttles or ships leaving the hangar, and piloting was never one of his required skills. The only person aboard who could possibly fly Eight-Seven away, possibly be _willing_ to fly him out of here, is the prisoner. Freeing a prisoner, especially such a high value one, is treason.

Still, it’s not like he’s got any other options here.

Where he’ll go once he’s away from the _Finalizer_ , Eight-Seven has no idea. He supposes he’ll figure it out when the time comes. For right now, planning their escape is enough to make his heart stutter in his chest.

When he has as many details accounted for as he can think of, Eight-Seven lays down on his bunk and tries to sleep. His back is throbbing with remembered pain, and underneath that is the returned thrum of too much distance between him and the dæmon who lives in a cage with his designation number on it. He’s lived with the pain his entire life, and Eight-Seven hardly even notices it anymore; the only time he pays it attention is immediately after a visit to the kennel, and the brief respite such a visit allows.

Sleep is a long time in coming to him. When it does, Eight-Seven dreams of terrible things. He dreams of Jakku.

 

\--

 

Eight-Seven wakes in the middle of the night. The _Finalizer_ is a little more than halfway through the graveyard shift, which means a minimal number of troopers awake and patrolling the hallways. There’s no better time to stage a breakout.

He pulls on his armor silently, a lifetime of practice ensuring he can do it effortlessly in the dark. Around him, the air is filled with the sounds of a barracks at rest—the low snuffle of snoring men, the rustle of sheets as they move about in their sleep—and it’s familiar, reassuring. He’s woken up countless times in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, allowed himself to be lulled back to sleep by these same noises.

He isn’t going back to sleep this time, but the rhythmic breathing of his brothers bolsters his courage, reminds Eight-Seven what he has to do if he’s going to survive.

There’s no room in the ranks for a Separated Stormtrooper. FN-2187 has seen it only once, the lifeless husk that results from the trauma of the guillotine, and the trooper in question had been disposed of soon after. This time tomorrow, that could be Eight-Seven.

Leaving the First Order is his only option for survival.

Eight-Seven slips out of the barracks, boot treads quiet on the polished floors, and marches back to the interrogation block. It’s a struggle, keeping his breathing regulated and the agitation out of his walk, but he manages to pass by all the patrols unquestioned. When he reaches his destination, he takes a moment to review the security footage, practicing what he’s going to say in his head.

The tiny security holo of Kylo Ren sweeps out of the cell, promising to come back soon to pry the rest of the Rebellion secrets from the pilot’s mind. Nervously, Eight-Seven checks the timestamp on the footage and heaves a breath of relief when he sees that almost half an hour has passed. Ren will be busy mobilizing a retrieval squad right about now, so it won’t occur to him to check up on the prisoner until he gets a report back from the planet.

The troopers guarding the prisoner don’t know that, though.

He takes a deep breath, summoning his courage and any scrap of acting skill he might’ve ever possessed. Then Eight-Seven steps forward into the cell block, nodding to the two guards on duty. With only one prisoner on the entire ship, most of the cell block troopers have been relocated to other duties for the time being. This only makes Eight-Seven’s mission easier.

“Kylo Ren wants the prisoner brought to him immediately,” FN-2187 says, trying to imitate Captain Phasma’s commanding bark.

No trooper would dare question an order that came from Kylo Ren. One guard moves to the control console and opens the cell in question, and the other steps forward with Eight-Seven to unlock the prisoner’s shackles, snapping a pair of flexcuffs onto his wrists instead. Eight-Seven takes the prisoner roughly by the arm and leads him from the cell.

Neither of the guards volunteer to help Eight-Seven escort the prisoner to Ren’s side.

The Resistance pilot is in rough shape. He’s limping, there are tiny lines of pain in the shadows of his face, and every time Eight-Seven jostles his arm to keep up appearances he winces. His hands won’t stop shaking, and he can barely stay on his feet. But once they’ve traversed two hallways the pilot seems to gather himself, and he starts fighting against Eight-Seven’s hold in earnest.

It gets hard enough to hold onto the man without exacerbating his injuries that Eight-Seven has no choice but to haul him into a nearby utility closet and pull off his helmet. “Look,” Eight-Seven tries desperately, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m trying to get you out of here.”

“You’re with the Resistance?” It’s ridiculous, the sheer amount of hope that fills the man’s blood-streaked face. Eight-Seven almost feels bad for having to crush it.

“What? No, no, no.”

“Oh.” The pilot’s eyes narrow. “Then why?”

“Because…” he swallows, trying to conceal the desperation that must be lurking in his eyes. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

Eight-Seven waits for several breathless moments while the pilot studies him. Dark eyes are hazy with pain, and yet the intent in them is sharper than Phasma’s vibroblade. Finally, the pilot comes to a realization and nods. “You need a pilot,” he says, confident in his assertion.

“I need a pilot,” FN-2187 admits. “I need to get out of here, and so do you. Let’s help each other, yeah?”

Slowly, he nods. “Alright. What’s your plan?”

This is the part Eight-Seven is most unsure about, but it’s not like he needs to admit that to anybody else. “Can you fly a TIE fighter?” he asks.

The pilot grins at him cockily. His teeth are very white. “I can fly anything.”

Eight-Seven damn well hopes that’s true. He jams his helmet back over his head and tugs them both out of the utility closet, mumbling an apology when the other man hisses in pain. It’s a quick walk after that to the main hangar bay, but there are more patrols to get past unnoticed here than any other part of the ship and if anyone stops them, Eight-Seven doesn’t have a good excuse prepared. None of the officers would have ordered the prisoner brought back out to the hangar, not even Kylo Ren.

The troopers don’t look twice at Eight-Seven and his pilot, not even when Eight-Seven starts muttering to himself to stay calm. They reach the relative safety of the TIE docks, and Eight-Seven gestures at one in the middle of the lineup. “That one,” he says, helpfully steadying the other man as he tries to climb into the cockpit. It’s a steep step up into the TIE, and the pilot is barely stable on his feet as it is.

Eight-Seven climbs in and shuts the hatch behind himself once the pilot has gotten settled, running light fingers over the consoles. Neither of them mentions how badly his hands shake. “Yeah, I can fly this. I can definitely fly this,” he says, nodding his head decisively and then wincing. “Ow.”

“Your confidence is overwhelming.”

“Well, if I can’t, we’re not gonna be around long enough to complain about it,” the pilot says. The TIE starts up with a muted whine, and Eight-Seven’s seat vibrates underneath him. He quickly does up the safety harness, hands clenching on the buckles. “You know how to shoot?”

Eight-Seven is the best shot in his squad, but now’s not the time to boast. “Blasters, yeah.”

“Fighter weapons run along the same principles. Use the joystick on the left to toggle between the three kinds of pulses. Joystick on the right to aim, squeeze the triggers to fire.” Their take-off is ungainly, bumping the sensor arrays against the sides of the cradle until the pilot must figure out what he’s doing, leveling them out. Then they both yelp, jerked hard against the harnesses as something yanks them back. “I can fix this,” he says shakily, “Watch me fix this.”

Eight-Seven wishes he could see the other man’s face. He would love to watch the pilot fix this, except he has no idea what’s wrong and now his brothers are shooting at them. His gloved hands are shivering against the weapons console, and it’s a combination of desperation and conviction that finally allows him to fire back.

Something comes loose with a clunk, and then they’re zooming out of the hangar into the black, Eight-Seven shooting desperately all the while.

 

\--

 

It’s only after they’ve blown up the _Finalizer_ ’s main ray gun that Eight-Seven has the spare brain space to remember there’s a goal here beyond _shoot as many holes in the Star Destroyer as possible_. More specifically—TIE fighters are capable of achieving lightspeed, if only for short distances, and that’s all they need to get into another system. From there, Eight-Seven can hitch a ride on a freighter to the Outer Rim and disappear. The First Order will never find him out there.

And if that means that he’ll never feel quite complete again, then, well. Eight-Seven has spent his entire life with a phantom hole in the center of his chest; he’s long since gotten used to the pain.

“I’m Poe, by the way,” the pilot shouts back over the hum of the engines. “Poe Dameron. What’s your name?”

Eight-Seven hasn’t known the pilot—Poe—long enough to trust him with his nickname, so he rattles off his full designation. “FN-2187.”

“FN- _what_?”

“2187!”

Poe shakes his head so vigorously that Eight-Seven can feel their seats shake. Or maybe that’s the TIE fighter rattling around them, he’s not quite sure. “Well, I ain’t calling you that. FN, yeah? How ‘bout Finn, that alright with you?”

“Finn,” Eight-Seven repeats, testing the word out on his tongue. It tingles. “I like it!”

Poe whoops loudly, sending the TIE into a tight barrel roll to evade a few especially persistent enemy fighters. Eight-Seven— _Finn_ , he’s Finn now, he’s gotta remember that—fires back, but he quickly gets distracted by the ball of sand and dust that swings wildly into view.

“Where’re we going?”

“I gotta get back to Jakku,” Poe says. Kind of desperately, but Finn’s a little too distracted not getting _blown up_ to notice.

Still, though. “Get back to Jak—? Get _back?_ Why would you wanna go back to _Jakku_?”

“I left a couple things behind,” Poe says grimly. “My dæmon, for starters.”

Finn frowns absently, fully absorbed in hitting his targets. Back on the _Finalizer_ , breaking Poe out of the interrogation block, he hadn’t even thought to ask about the other man’s dæmon. The First Order had taken his away before he could walk, after all, and never let her go. Finn had been forced to leave his dæmon behind to protect her.

It makes sense to him that Poe, under imminent threat of getting captured, would make his dæmon hide to do the same.

“She’s with my droid, an orange and white BB-8 unit. The First Order will be searching for them now, and we gotta get to ‘em first,” Poe explains. He rubs at his chest with a grimace, long enough for Finn to notice even though he’s facing the opposite direction.

Eight-Seven understands loyalty to his brothers—it’d been the only thing holding him back from the command track, according to Captain Phasma—but this might be a bit extreme. There’s a difference between not letting Slip—FN-2003—fall behind during training sims and deliberately going back to a warzone for a droid and a dæmon. “You’re crazy,” he says. It’s better than the rest of the words rattling around in his head, which include _delusional_ and _reckless_ and _need a priority check._

“She’s my _dæmon._ Plus, they’ve got a map to Luke Skywalker.”

“Still crazy,” Eight-Seven asserts. He knows who Luke Skywalker is, of course—in the cold, impersonal way that he knows who all the major enemies of the First Order are, because Luke Skywalker is a name of myth and legend. Most of the troopers hadn’t thought him real, just a made-up folktale to explain the destruction of the Empire, and even those who had believed in the stories were convinced he died years ago. But if there’s a map, if _Poe_ has a map, then he has to be real.

Right?

“It’s my mission,” Poe says defensively. “I found the map, I have to get it back to the Resistance.”

This, too, is something Eight-Seven understands on a fundamental level. Hell, he’d had it practically programmed into his head when he was a young initiate. Complete your mission at all costs. There was no acceptable excuse for failure to complete a mission once assigned, not even death.

It’s this basic commonality that finally convinces Eight-Seven— _Finn,_ damnit, he _wants_ to be Finn—that Poe has a point. Not that he had much say in the matter, since he’s not the one flying, but. Finn is on his own for the first time in his life, he feels like he should be making his own decisions now. “Fine, but I’ll find—”

A shudder wracks the TIE, strong enough to throw them both against the harnesses again and send the ship screaming out of control. Whatever Finn had been going to say is lost to the whine of the engines as they strain under Poe’s attempts to wrestle back control of their flight path. “We’re hit,” he says wildly, and “the right engine’s gone, I’m not gonna be able to land this thing.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“Pray for a miracle,” Poe says grimly.

 


	2. kazmiir

Finn’s been walking for miles. Hours. Days, probably.

He’s surrounded by endless sand on all sides. It peaks into mighty dunes higher than Finn is tall, and dips into treacherous valleys that threaten to steal his feet right out from under him. He’s thirsty, probably because it’s a million degrees on this wretched planet and there’s no water to be found _anywhere_. Every bone and muscle in his body aches from the pain of the escape and crash landing, throbbing in time with his heartbeat.

And, oh yeah, his brand new friend is dead.

All Finn has left to remember the brave Resistance pilot by is his jacket, scuffed and blood-stained and now covered in sand. He hadn’t even been able to retrieve Poe’s—the first person to look beyond the mask and see _him_ , the man who _offered him a name_ —body from the cockpit before the TIE had gotten swallowed up by the shifting sand. That honestly hurts worse than accepting that Poe’s gone at all. His friend— _he’d had a friend—_ deserved better.

Finn had probably lingered too long at the remains of the crash site before hauling himself to his feet and starting to walk. He doesn’t know if there’s anything to walk to, but there has to be more than one village on the planet, right? If he just walks far enough, he’ll find someone to get him off this rock and _away._

(Poe was supposed to be that someone.)

It’s times like these, Finn thinks, that it’d be nice to have a dæmon at his side to pull him from his melancholy thoughts. There’d been whispers in the barracks, on those rare nights when none of them could sleep, about the dæmons in the kennel. Why they were there, why all of the troopers had a gaping pain in their chests that refused to go away except in the kennel, what the different shapes meant. Why the First Order insisted on keeping them locked away.

Slip had muttered once that humans in the New Republic insisted on having their dæmons at their sides _all the time,_ and Eight-Seven had stayed up the entire night wondering what that must be like.

The only dæmon he’s ever talked to is the little vornskr he had to leave behind, and Finn can’t imagine what it’d be like to have her following at his heels everywhere he goes.  She nagged too much, for one—always worried about Eight-Seven’s training with his brothers, always asking if he was taking care of himself.

Now he’s on his own, there won’t be _anyone_ checking up on him anymore. Finn can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Eventually, he stumbles into the closest thing to civilization Jakku is likely to have, a sprawling tent-and-mortar-city nestled in the valley between three hard ridges of sand and stone. Freighter ships and speeders flank the edges, and Finn is hopeful about his chances at hitching a ride on one of them. First, though, he needs water.

His throat is burning and the veins are standing out on the back of his hands, skin dry and cracked. Still, nobody seems to have any water to spare for a dehydrated stranger. Finn finally spots a public watering hole for the local livestock and almost trips over himself hurrying to reach it.

The water is so refreshing he doesn’t even care about the taste.

When he’s finally drunk enough—nowhere near his fill, but the beast who’d knocked him away looks like it might fight him if Finn comes back for a second try—he turns his attention to the local populace. He needs to find someone to take him off planet, who will trade work for transport instead of demanding payment. The only things Finn owns right now are his Stormtrooper blacks and Poe’s jacket. He doesn’t even have a blaster anymore; it had blown up in the wreckage just like everything else.

He studies a few speculatively, wondering how best to approach. And then his entire thought process is derailed by the sight of a tiny scrap of girl fighting back against four hooded assailants. He instinctively starts forward to help the girl—four on one are never good odds, his training tells him, and maybe she’ll be so grateful she’ll help him get off this kriffing planet—but she’s got a staff and she knows how to wield it.

She kicks all four opponent’s asses with the help of a lightning-quick blur in the sand and then drops to her knees, tugging a burlap sack away from an orange and white ball-shaped droid. The girl asks something, and the droid bleeps back, but Finn’s too far away to overhear.

 _“She’s with my droid, an orange and white BB-8 unit. The First Order will be searching for them now, and we gotta get to ‘em first_ ,” Poe had said. He’d left his dæmon and the droid behind, to protect his mission, and then he’d died. They deserved to know that they could stop waiting now, that Poe wasn’t coming back.

Finn tells his feet to walk over, but it feels like someone’s attached duracrete blocks to his boots while he wasn’t looking.

The droid’s head swivels to scan it's surroundings and, whirring, the black lens focuses in on Finn. The girl follows it’s line of sight, that blur in the sand slithering up to coil around her arm.  _Oh shit,_ he has time to think, and then he’s running as fast as he can in the opposite direction.

He doesn’t get very far.

The staff comes out of nowhere. Finn takes it across the chest and lands flat on his back on the hard sand. The impact knocks the breath from his lungs.

A head pops into his view, menacing scowl on dainty features, and the girl points her staff at Finn’s chest. “What’s your hurry, thief?” she growls.

Finn sputters. “Thief? _Thief?_ ”

“That jacket. BB-8 says it belongs to his master,” the girl says. The sand-covered sleeve on her right arm rustles, and Finn flinches when he realizes it isn’t a sleeve at all. It’s a snake.

A sudden electrical zap to his leg, and Finn yelps. The round droid ball beeps rudely at him, metal arm extended and a live current sparking at the pronged end. A lump in Finn’s throat sinks all the way to the pit of his stomach; his previous suspicions have just been confirmed.

“Oh man,” he says. “You’re Poe Dameron’s droid.”

The ball beeps again.

“He was captured and taken back to Kylo Ren’s ship. I helped him escape. We crashed in the desert and he…” Finn swallows, hit all over again by the loss. “He didn’t make it.”

There’s a thump, and one of the side panels on the droid pops open. Then a dark mass hurtles itself at Finn’s chest, and he finds the breath knocked out of him for the second time in five minutes.

“ _He’s not dead!”_

Finn blinks. And blinks again. The dæmon on his chest scowls back fiercely, a mottled gray bat with hooked claws on her wingtips that dig into his black undershirt.

“He’s _not,_ ” the bat insists. “I’m his dæmon, I think I would know if he was dead!”

Pieces start to click together in Finn’s mind at that. Poe had left his dæmon with his droid, he’d said—to keep them and the map to Luke Skywalker safe. If Poe was still alive, he’d be trying to get back to them. Logically speaking, Finn should stick with them until Poe gets there.

He can figure out what to do next from there.

Cautiously, Finn pushes himself up from the sand again. The bat shuffles around until she’s tucked up under Finn’s jacket, still clinging to his shirt. Finn can feel her shivering against his chest, and while it doesn’t relieve the ever-present pain like touching the vornskr back on the _Finalizer_ did, it still sends a rush of protectiveness through Finn’s veins.

“He’s coming back for me,” the bat mumbles. “He has to.”

“Of course he is,” Finn says, and climbs gingerly to his feet. The droid ball is beeping tersely to itself, as if debating something, and the girl—the girl is giving him an admiring, wide-eyed look.

Her serpent dæmon coils tighter around her forearm.

“What? What is it?” Finn asks.

She plants her staff upright in the sand and nudges BB-8 with a knee. “So, you’re with the Resistance, right?”

And Finn—how is Finn supposed to resist an opening like that? This is his chance to be somebody of value, to be a _hero._ He straightens his shoulders, tugging the jacket down self-consciously. “Yes, yes definitely. I’m with the Resistance, yep.”

The bat huffs, muttering something disparaging under her breath.

“So you can help BB-8 complete his mission?”

“Well.” Finn glances down at the little droid, who rolls back a foot and tilts its head up to stare at him. He hadn’t known it was possible for a droid to look that unimpressed. “I mean, Poe’s coming back, so. He can complete his own mission? But I can help!” he hurries to add. “I will most definitely help.”

“Good.” The girl nods, satisfied, and starts to kneel down to the droid’s level. But Finn’s trained eyes spot a squad of Stormtroopers at the same time the troopers see _them_ , and the leader points while a second starts shouting into his radio.

“Talking later,” Finn says hurriedly, “running now!” He grabs the girl’s hand instinctively, using it to tug her into a run in the opposite direction of the troopers and hoping BB-8 can keep up. With every step, Finn is keenly aware of the tiny warm weight against his chest and how fragile she is, how quickly she’ll be crushed if they’re captured.

The girl yanks her hand away, quickly pushing her serpent up to curl around her shoulders and scowling at Finn. “I know how to run without you holding my hand!” she says.

 _That’s great, but I might need you to hold mine,_ Finn bites his tongue to avoid saying. He needs to save his breath. He wasn’t able to keep hold of the vornskr, had to leave her behind, and he lost Poe in the desert. He doesn’t want to lose this one too.

She steers them into the shelter of a tent with blasterfire nipping at their heels. Her eyes are wide and dark in her flushed face. “They’re shooting at both of us!”

“Yeah, well, they think you’re helping me,” Finn says wearily. He wants to wait for Poe, but they may not have time. Stormtroopers don’t give up on a mission until it’s completed or they’re dead, and traitors are hunted down with extreme prejudice. Now that they know he’s here, nothing will stop them chasing after him short of a blaster bolt to the face.

The girl opens her mouth to protest further, but Finn’s ears catch a familiar whine and he holds up a hand to stop her. TIE fighters. Panic seizes him, and without thinking Finn reaches for the girl’s hand one more time.

They barely clear the tent before it goes up in a ball of sand and flame, and Finn is hauled off his feet by the strength of the blast.

His back loudly protests at landing flat on the sand. Again.

 

\--

 

Finn takes a deep breath of relief after they break atmosphere, wiping the sweat from his brow and hooking the headset back onto the wall. His knees are wobbly when he stands up from the weapons chair, and he can’t quite feel his hands anymore. They’re completely numb from fighting the vibrating controls.

The bat is still clinging to his chest.

Finn blinks down at her, nonplussed. This is the first time he’s had any sort of prolonged contact with a dæmon—every scrap of time he spent with the vornskr in the kennel was closely monitored and rationed like drops of water in the desert—and it’s…not unpleasant, definitely, but weird.

“Hi,” he says weakly.

She wriggles in response, clawed wingtips scratching his chest through the black undershirt. She’s still shivering. “We’re getting farther away again,” she says sadly. “He was so close.”

Finn swears internally. In the rush of escaping from the TIE fighters, he’d completely forgotten about his mission to reunite Poe with his dæmon. If they could’ve just laid low for another hour or so—but no. It doesn’t do him any good to think about the what-ifs. They have the map. Stormtroopers are no doubt swarming the planet by now, and if they try to go back they’ll almost certainly get caught. Or worse, blown up.

Poe will just have to fend for himself a little longer. Deep down, Finn hopes that isn’t too much to ask of the Resistance pilot.

“I’m sorry,” he offers, because he doesn’t have anything else. Finn cups a hand around her tiny body protectively as he ascends the ladder back into the ship they’ve commandeered, feeling her shake against his palm. “Where will he go, now that you’re off-planet? Back to the Resistance?”

“Maybe,” she says, but her lovely voice is filled with doubt.

“He has to know that’s where you’ll head, right? You gotta take the map to them.”

She gives him an assessing look, eyes dark glints of light amongst the mottled gray fur. “Did you take a blaster bolt to the head running away from those Stormtroopers? I’m his _dæmon_. The only reason Poe won’t follow after us immediately is if the Resistance gets to him first. Especially if he thinks BB-8 and I got caught by the First Order.”

Finn’s brow wrinkles in confusion—the First Order had taught them about dæmons, sure, but the bat seems to mean something entirely different—but footsteps echoing on the floor grating cut him off before he can question the bat further. The girl who’d saved his life, who’d taken his hand and dragged him out of danger, comes running back from the cockpit and crashes into him. Finn catches her instinctively.

“That was so great!” the girl says breathlessly. Now that he’s not being held at staff-point or running for his life, Finn has time to study her features. She’s pretty, with her sun-beaten skin and dark eyes wide with excitement. Her snake dæmon is coiled about her shoulders, vibrantly colored feathers clashing with the sandy scales underneath. BB-8 rolls in ecstatic circles around their feet.

It’s easy to feed off the exhilaration, reflect it right back to her. That _had_ been a spectacular getaway. “Have you ever flown like that before?” he asks.

“No! I mean, I’ve flown a few ships but I’ve never even left the planet!”

Finn is even more impressed than before. “That’s incredible,” he says. “And that shot—the way you set me up for it perfectly!”

“And you made it!” she cheers. Her dæmon flicks his tail, beady eyes studying Finn and the bat half hidden under the cut of his jacket. He hisses something too low for Finn to hear, and the girl sobers. “You’re right, Kaz—we’ve just escaped the Stormtroopers together, and I don’t even know your name.”

FN-2187—Eight-Seven— _Finn_ —has never been more glad to have a proper name to call himself. The way this girl is looking at him, like he’s a hero and a good person, _a real person_ , it’s intoxicating. He doesn’t want to imagine her expression if she figures out the truth about him. “Finn,” he says quietly, reverently. The name a real hero had gifted him with.

She beams back at him, face aglow. “I’m Rey. This is Kazmiir.”

Her serpent hisses sibilantly, triple-forked tongue flickering in the air.

Finn blinks at them. “Your dæmon has a _name?_ ”

“Of course he has a name. We’re dæmons, not animals!” The bat interjects loudly, clawing her way up Finn’s shirt until she can perch on his shoulder. “I’m Nataaria.”

The world is getting weirder, Finn thinks. He has a name now, a real and proper name to call his own. And so, apparently, do dæmons.

Kazmiir slithers down Rey’s arm in a lazy coil until he reaches her wrist. Rey doesn’t seem to notice the movement—her eyes are fixed on Nataaria and she seems shocked more than anything else, just like back on Jakku—but Finn feels the weight of the serpent’s attention heavily. It reminds him of his old superiors in the First Order. Kazmiir mutters something back to his human, and Rey nods absently.

“Where’s your dæmon, then?” Nataaria asks, shuffling her wings. “I know she’s not with you, or I’d feel her. Were you dumb like my Poe and left her behind?”

“Uh,” Finn says helplessly.

From the floor, BB-8 makes a ‘blat’ sound.

“No, it’s not rude to ask that, BB-8,” Nataaria says dismissively. “I’m tiny and cute, I can ask whatever kind of questions I want.”

BB-8 bleeps doubtfully. Finn kind of wishes he spoke binary, but it had never been on the required skills list for a First Order Sanitation Trooper. But he has the opportunity to learn now; he can find someone to teach him. That’s a heady thought.

“She couldn’t come with me,” he says vaguely, in answer to Nataaria’s previous question. Rey’s still looking at him like he’s a hero, and he can’t stand to crush that hope in her eyes.

Nataaria considers that for a moment, before harrumphing. “Like I said, dumb,” she pronounces, and crawls back under the shelter of the jacket.

When he blinks at Rey, hoping for an explanation, she’s still caught up in her shocked staring. Kazmiir stretches sinuously, and the rasp of his feathered scales over Rey’s sleeve produces a resonant hum. The sound breaks Rey out of her stupor. “I’m sorry, it’s just—I’ve never—that’s the most I’ve ever seen a dæmon interact with someone who isn’t _theirs_.”

Finn has no idea what this means.

“The only human Kazmiir’s ever talked to,” Rey explains slowly, “is me. The only human who’s ever touched him is me.”

Finn frowns. The dæmons in the kennels had always been eerily silent when he was in there. He’d only ever talked to the vornskr, but that was because her cage was labeled with his designation. None of the others had seemed overly interested in him. And they’d all been handled by the Reconditioning personnel. Had they been doing it wrong? Was that why it had always hurt him to have the vornskr held?

A low series of beeps emanates from the droid between them.

“I know it’s not a law, BB-8,” Rey says. She bites her lip uncertainly, glancing at her dæmon in an appeal for help. Kazmiir flicks his tail in a back and forth motion along the strip of skin bared between her tunic and her sleeve. “It’s not a law,” she tries again, “but it’s kind of…taboo? You don’t do it. Dæmons talk to their person, and other dæmons, and that’s it.”

“And the touching thing?”

“Also taboo. It hurts, if someone else touches him,” Rey supplies helpfully. She shudders, as if she’s remembering something horrible, and Finn realizes with a lurch in his gut that she’s speaking from personal experience.

He digests that slowly, absorbing the new information. When the thought processes through his brain to the logical conclusion, he’s horror-struck. Finn whips open the edge of his jacket so he can peer at the little gray bat huddled underneath. “Have I been hurting you this entire time and you just didn’t say anything?” he demands incredulously. His stomach turns, threatening to revolt.

Nataaria smacks him in the face with the edge of her wing. “Of course not,” she says crabbily. “It’s weird, but it’s actually kind of comforting? I’m missing Poe, and you’re missing your dæmon, and it’s…you smell like him.”

What? _Oh_ , Finn realizes. _The jacket._

He doesn’t bother to counter the assertion that he’s missing his dæmon. That seems like it would invite more questions than would be helpful, right now. “So, you’re okay, then?” he asks anxiously. She’s so tiny and fragile, the last thing Finn wants to do is hurt her.

“Not really, but under the circumstances,” Nataaria says. She studies Finn’s worried expression, and snuggles closer to him. The motion sends tingles of warmth running through his veins. “I’m alright, Finn.  If I’d wanted to, I would’ve gone back to BB-8.”

The droid makes an agreeing sort of sound, rolling over Finn’s foot and disappearing down the hallway into the cockpit. Finn yelps—BB-8 is _heavy_ —and pretends he doesn’t see Rey laughing quietly to herself as he tries to regain his dignity.

 

\--

 

“You did a good job, kid,” Han Solo says after he looks over the dressing Finn’s applied to Chewbacca’s arm. Chewbacca warbles an agreement—at least, Finn assumes it’s an agreement, he can’t understand a word the Wookie’s saying but the general tone is one of approval. “Wookies aren’t known for being cooperative patients.”

“You’re telling me,” Finn mutters.

Nataaria thumps a wing against his collarbone. It hurts a lot more than he’d expect it to.

Han eyes them both curiously, Finn and the tiny scrap of dæmon half-hidden under the lining of his jacket. “More capable than I would’ve expected you to be,” is all he finally says, though. There’s a considering twist to the corners of his mouth, like he’s been pleasantly surprised. Han’s dæmon snorts and turns until she can thwack the flat of her impressive horns against his leg.

Finn doesn’t quite know what to make of her.

“Seven hells, Caritia,” Han mutters, rubbing his leg ruefully. “You know that hurts.”

Caritia eyes him critically, then heaves herself to her paws and moves to sit on the other side of Chewie’s seat. Her movements are sleek and graceful, unquestionably feline, and her thick mane ripples. She’s one of the largest dæmons Finn’s ever seen, her shoulders at mid-thigh height and long straight horns rising even higher above that. Despite her size, Caritia moves almost silently on the floor grating.

“What is she?” Finn asks curiously.

Chewie grunts something, giving Han an accusing look. One long furry arm tugs the Wookie’s crossbow more securely into his lap.

After sizing Finn up intently, Han apparently comes to a decision. “S’called a kima. From the Correllian system,” he says. Caritia blinks her unnervingly yellow eyes at Finn, and he swallows. “Don’t worry, she’s harmless.”

Harmless, yeah right. Finn got a good look at her fangs, earlier when Han and Chewie were posturing for the gangs, and there’s nothing harmless about them. Or the two foot horns rising back over her bristly mane.

Chewie warbles something else.

“Wha—no! I locked the course in the nav-computer first thing, there’s no way she could’ve tampered with it,” Han says, raking a hand through his shaggy hair.

Chewie is less than impressed. The Wookie makes a violent hand gesture that Finn has no hope of understanding.

It must mean something to Han, though—they’ve apparently been working together for years, maybe they’ve developed secret hand signals?—because he swears viciously under his breath and stomps back off to the cockpit, shouting for Rey to stop fiddling with things and come join them. Caritia lets the distance stretch between them, then reluctantly climbs back to her feet and pads after him.

The cockpit clanks. Loudly.

“I was just curious about where we’re going,” Rey insists as she comes into view, BB-8 rolling along behind her. She drops into the bench seat next to Finn, bumping their shoulders together. Her Kazmiir hisses disgruntledly as he coils into a ball of feathered scales on the tabletop in front of them. “I know what I’m doing, I wasn’t going to mess anything up!”

“You know how to fly, I’ll give you that. But you could’a just asked, it’s not a secret,” Han says.

“So where are we going?” Finn asks, at the same time Rey blurts out, “You’re taking us to the Illenium system, right?”

Han blinks at them both. “What? No,” he says.

BB-8 warbles questioningly.

“We’re going to see an old smuggling friend. She’ll get you back to your Resistance,” Caritia says solemnly. She’s curled up by Chewie’s feet again and is cleaning herself meticulously, starting with her left forepaw.

Han sputters.

Insolently, Caritia blinks her lamplike yellow eyes at her human. “What? You said it wasn’t a secret.”

“That’s not the point,” Han snaps. He points a finger at her, swinging it around to include Finn, Rey and BB-8 in the gesture. “The point is—the _point is,_ we don’t give out trade secrets to people we hardly know.”

Chewie rattles off a long list of complaints at them both. Halfway through, Caritia has rolled her eyes and gone back to her grooming, while Han runs a long-suffering hand over his face and slumps into a seat at the table across from them.

He sighs, deep and weary. “You, Rey. You said you’d heard of me?”

“From the spacers and smugglers at Niima Outpost, yes.” Rey nods eagerly.

“They ever tell you about Maz Kanata?”


	3. nataaria

From the way Han had spoken of her, Finn half expects Maz Kanata to be seven feet tall and breathe fire at her enemies. He imagines an imposing figure like Captain Phasma, ruling over her pirate empire with an iron fist, thieving and smuggling whatever she pleases. She is galactically renowned, has warrants out for her arrest in sixteen systems, and is rumored to be older than the invention of the hyperdrive.

The being they meet doesn’t look like any of these things.

Finn blinks down at a wizened old woman who doesn’t even reach his waist, orange face obscured by the enormous glasses that she twists and fiddles with to bring them into focus. Long strings of beads hang from her neck, and her tiny wrinkled hands are dripping with rings.

This _is the infamous smuggler?_ he thinks. _Surely there’s been a mistake._

Kanata squints at them for a long moment, studying Finn and Rey intently and adjusting her glasses the entire time. Then she waves them over to an empty table in the back corner of her castle, grumbling all the while. “It’s been too blasted long, Solo,” she says, standing on her chair so she can see above the tabletop.

“I know, Maz,” Han replies. His tone is shot through with long-suffering fondness. Caritia rolls her eyes at him and flops to the floor mostly under Han’s chair, curled up facing outwards to keep an eye on the surrounding pirates.

Finn’s mostly been trying to ignore them, but now he too turns his attention to the castle patrons. There are so many different aliens, is his first realization. It’s a riot of color and sound, all these criminals gathered under one roof. And almost no daemons in sight, though a couple of the more unsavory-looking pirates are eyeing theirs speculatively.

He’s startled when Kazmiir, who has draped himself around Rey’s shoulders like a shawl and hums with every breath he takes, inches his head closer and whispers, “Most species in the galaxy don’t have daemons. Don’t let them get too close, they have no concept of boundaries.”

“Disrespectful scum,” Nataaria mutters.

Rey bites back a smile, and there’s a curious flutter in Finn’s stomach.

“I assume you need something,” Maz tells Han. “Desperately.”

Han runs a tired hand over his face, sighing. Finn suddenly gets the feeling that Han Solo—he _is_ the famous Rebellion general, no matter what he says; Finn recognizes that face from his Galactic History lectures—would rather be anywhere else than here. “These guys need to get to the Resistance. Fast as you can.” He waves indicatively at Rey, Finn, and BB-8.

The droid beeps affirmatively, swiveling its little head to do another scan of the castle interior.

“And you can’t do it yourself, hmm? What’s wrong with the _Falcon?_ ” Maz peers expectantly at him through her enormous glasses.

Han sputters. “Nothing, I just—I can’t, alright. The _Falcon_ is too easily tracked. You’re one of the major financial backers of the Resistance—I know you are, don’t tell me you ain’t—and you can get them there.”

Maz purses her lips, and Finn has a swooping sense of foreboding in the pit of his stomach. “I can, yes. But I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Too long have you been running away from your past, Han Solo,” the ancient pirate says. “The Force has brought you all together for a reason.”

Rey leans forward in her seat, brow furrowed. “How can you say that? You don’t know anything about us.” On her shoulder, Kazmiir flicks his triple-forked tongue through the air. His vibrant feathering flutters with every movement Rey makes.

“Would you like me to ask?” Maz says. There’s a dangerous undercurrent to her voice now.

Caritia’s horns thump against the bottom of the table, she gets up so fast. Han is tense in his chair. “Maz,” he says warningly. “You know I don’t trust any of that hocus pocus.”

“Maybe not, but it trusts in you.” Maz settles down in her seat, fiddling with her glasses and blinking meditatively at them. After a long moment, her breathing slows. When she speaks, her voice is deeper, more relaxed, and she twists the round discs of her glasses with every word. “Why do you need to get to the Resistance so badly?” she muses.

Han holds up a hand to prevent Rey and Finn from responding. His shoulders are so tense Finn’s muscles ache in sympathy, and there’s a tight look to the smuggler’s face.

Maz’s eyes drift open after a long moment, and land unerringly on BB-8. “Interesting,” she says, still in that meditative tone. “The quest for Skywalker is a long and difficult one—but I think you have more of a chance than most.”

BB-8 gives her a dismissive ‘blat’ tone.

Nataaria’s claws suddenly dig into Finn’s skin, under the jacket. He bites back the pained noise that wants to escape.

“Is Han Solo meant to rejoin the Resistance?” Maz asks the air, closing her eyes again. The motion of her hands twisting the lenses is smooth, practiced.

This is not what Finn signed up for. Not at all. “What’s she doing?” he hisses across the table at Han, who raises his hand again in a shushing gesture. Han looks conflicted, heartfelt longing battling with stark terror on his face. He waits for Maz to answer her own question with bated breath.

Maz hums. “You knew you couldn’t run away forever,” she tells Han shrewdly.

The smuggler’s entire body seems to droop. “Yeah,” he rasps.

“She’s waiting for you.”

Caritia grumbles, deep in her throat, and Finn watches Han jump in his seat. He assumes the kima smacked him with her horns again. “Leia doesn’t wanna see me,” he says dejectedly.

Maz raises one wrinkled eyebrow. “She’s fighting a war against an evil she thought vanquished many years ago. I can’t imagine a situation she’d want to see you _less._ ” The pirate considers all three of them around the table, and lowers her voice like she’s imparting a great secret. “I have seen evil take many forms. The Sith, the Empire—now it’s the First Order. If we do not stand up and fight the growing darkness, it will spread like a virus and consume everything in its path.”

“You can’t,” Finn interjects, leaning forward and thumping his elbows on the table. “You can’t fight them. The First Order will slaughter all of us, one by one. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

Maz turns her altogether too perceptive gaze on Finn, then, studying him from head to toe and lingering on Nataaria’s fuzzy head peeking out from under his jacket. “When you live as long as I have, boy, you start seeing the same souls over and over again. Dæmons are just the most easily recognizable shape for a soul to take, did you know? There’s a unique predictability to it—soldiers tend towards canine shapes, pirates to small but dangerous predators. Live long enough, see enough of them, and it occurs to you that maybe their shapes mean something.”

Finn’s stomach sinks.

“Why are you carrying around another man’s daemon like she’s your own?” Maz asks, and that dangerous undercurrent is lining her voice again. Her hands drift back up to play with the lenses again, spinning them in slow deliberate circles. “Whose daemon is she?”

Han’s eyes go wide and accusing. “What’s she talking about, kid?” he growls, a passable imitation of his Wookie first mate, and his Caritia’s horns scrape the underside of the table again.

“You could just ask me, you know. I’m not being held against my will,” Nataaria grumbles, climbing out from under the shelter of his jacket and perching on Finn’s right shoulder. She’s still shivering, even though the castle is warmly insulated. Kazmiir hums a single rich note as he inches minutely closer to them, protective.

Maz, abruptly, starts to laugh. “Forgive me, my dear,” she says warmly, speaking directly to Nataaria. Finn thinks back to what Rey had said about that, _taboo_ , and wonders if breaking taboos is a pilot stereotype. He doesn’t know if Maz Kanata is a pilot, but it wouldn’t surprise him. “Last time we met you were rather quieter, and hiding in Commander Dameron’s hair.”

Nataaria mutters disparagingly under her breath, too low for Finn to hear, something along the lines of, “best not to draw attention to oneself in a place like this.” Out of the corner of his eye Finn watches Kazmiir slip even closer, in real danger now of toppling off Rey’s shoulder, and the two dæmons put their heads together and converse in a series of hisses and chirps he has no hope of understanding.

The pirate turns her attention back to Finn. “Who are you, then?” Maz asks him inquisitively. She flips her glasses up and away from her face, apparently done with whatever mystic business she was using them for, and squints at him instead. “You protect the dæmon of a Resistance pilot—but you can’t be Resistance yourself, or you’d have your own way of getting to the base. So where do you come from?”

Finn tenses. At his side, Rey’s brow has crinkled with confusion and Kazmiir is hissing wordlessly, little airy hums rising in the air with every ripple of his scales. “I’m not—” He barely gets two words in edgewise before he topples out of his chair, knees hitting the ground with a solid _thwack_ , gut twisting and cramping with excruciating pain. He yells, but no sound escapes his mouth. It hurts too badly, feels like somebody’s got a hand clenched around his heart and is slowly squeezing the life out of him.

Dimly, he’s aware of the clatter of chairs against stone, of Rey dropping to the floor beside him, and of Kazmiir and Nataaria squabbling quietly over his head. Rey wraps an arm around his shoulders, but Finn barely feels it. His entire world is pain.

Maz says something, a sharp edge to her words.

There are sharp lashes raining down on his back now, brief stinging starbursts of pain that are too numerous to count. Finn tries again to scream, but there’s no air left in his lungs. He struggles just to draw enough breath to remain conscious. The floor is spinning beneath his knees, reeling; Finn wonders absently if he’ll just spin right out of gravity’s embrace.

Something soft brushes his neck, traveling down. A curious warmth blooms in his ribcage. Slowly, he’s able to draw in a shallow breath, then a second. Finn becomes aware of the furious pounding of his heart, pumping precious oxygen through his limbs. He trembles, tiny pinpricks of pain lighting up his nervous system. When he manages to force his eyes open, Rey’s pressed against his side and Nataaria’s curled herself into a ball over his heart, skin to fur.

“What?” he struggles to ask. It feels like someone poured duracrete down his throat.

“Finn,” Rey says. Her eyes are wide and very, very dark. She’s shaking faintly against his side. “Finn, where’s your dæmon?”

He runs his tongue around his mouth absently, tasting bright copper in the well of his cheek. _Must’ve bitten down too hard_ , he thinks. And dæmons? What’ve dæmons got to do with anything?

Kazmiir is slung in a loose coil around Rey’s neck, bright feathers fluffed out to make him look three times his usual size. It’s the closest Finn’s ever gotten to his friend’s dæmon, and he’s startled to realize that the tiny scales around Kazmiir’s eyes are actually a milky white. “Focus, Finn,” the snake requests. His voice is velvety smooth, harmonizing with the resonant hum of his breathing. “This is important. Your dæmon, where is she?”

“Why?” he wonders.

“Why? Because she’s in pain, you numpty!” Nataaria says indignantly, voice muffled by the thin fabric of Finn’s shirt. Beady eyes glare at him under his shirt collar. “You two are connected, you feel her pain and she feels yours!”

The pain hasn’t gone away—it never _really_ goes away, but this is a different pain from the one he’s been carrying as long as he can remember—Finn’s just breathing through it a little easier. He wonders if he’s getting used to it, or if Nataaria’s presence is helping. Maybe both?

Eventually, he pulls himself together enough to take in their surroundings with bleary eyes. While he was out of it they’ve moved from the main hall of Maz’s castle to a tiny underground room with a fire roaring in the grate. Finn and Rey are sitting on a lumpy couch upholstered in the ugliest fabric he’s seen in his life, the only other furniture in the room a footstool and an absolutely ancient looking wooden chest in the corner. The door is securely latched, and they’re alone in the room.

“What happened?” he rasps.

Rey jostles him with her shoulder. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. You never answered the question.”

“What was the question?” Finn wonders. His brain feels like mush, sticking to the sides of his skull. A throbbing cramp starts up in his thigh, and travels down his leg like a firebrand.

Distantly, he’s aware of the worried glances Rey trades with the dæmons. _It’s probably important,_ he thinks. He should pay attention.

“Finn,” Kazmiir says, slow enough that Finn realizes he’s choosing his words very carefully. “Is she a prisoner of the First Order?”

Abruptly, a chasm he hadn’t known was hidden in his heart tears open, dark and gaping. An unbidden sob catches in his throat. “Yes,” he gulps. “She is.”

“Oh,” Rey says. She looks as tortured as he feels.

There’s pity in her eyes. Finn can’t stand seeing it, not there. Not Rey. “You don’t understand,” he forces out, the words scraping all the way up from the bottom of his lungs. “I’m not…I was a Stormtrooper. Taken from my family at birth and raised to do one thing. I barely saw my dæmon growing up; we weren’t allowed. In my first battle, I made a choice. I didn’t want to kill for them. That’s how I ended up on Jakku—I couldn’t stay, so I freed Poe and we ran for it.”

“And you just _left your dæmon behind?”_ Nataaria shrieks.

 “I couldn’t take her with me,” Finn shrugs. His entire back is one lingering ache. “That would’ve gotten us both thrown out the airlock, probably.”

Rey’s face is frozen in an expression of horror. Kazmiir coils tighter around her neck, until he looks like nothing so much as a colorful necklace.

He pulls on a brave face, pretending it doesn’t bother him at all. If they’re right—and why wouldn’t they be, they know more about this dæmon business than Finn does—then it’s possible he made a grave miscalculation in leaving the vornskr behind in the kennel. If the First Order is hurting her because of him…

“How did we get back here?” Finn asks, changing the subject quickly.

Nataaria’s fur rubs against his sternum, oddly soothing. “You collapsed. Maz said it would be safer not to make a scene, that she had a room we could use ‘til you came round. Han and Caritia and BB-8 went to go check on the _Falcon_ , I think.”

“Are they coming back?” He doesn’t want to think about what happens next if they don’t, if the _Millennium Falcon_ takes off and abandons them here. Maz has already said she won’t help them. The First Order has spies everywhere—they’re probably already on their way here to take him back and put him through the Separation machine—and the Resistance doesn’t even know to start looking for them, let alone where.

“Caritia promised she wouldn’t let them leave without us,” Kazmiir says reassuringly.

Finn meets the serpent dæmon’s eyes for a long moment, taking a couple deep breaths. His face grows warm, like sunshine beaming down on him, and inexplicably he feels the tiniest bit better. The cramp in his leg has traveled down and settled into an angry throbbing knot deep in his calf, where he has no hope of kneading it out, but the stinging rain of lashes upon his back has paused for the moment. He still feels a vice squeezing around his heart, but Nataaria’s warmth seems to be pushing that back enough for him to breathe and think.

He pushes himself upright, wobbling a little on unsteady legs, and takes a tentative step towards the door. Then another. Finn almost pitches headfirst towards the stone floor, but he finds his balance again at the last moment.

“Where are you going?” Rey demands, voice too loud in the tiny room.

Finn grits his teeth. Five more steps to the door. He can do it. “To the _Falcon_ ,” he says determinedly. “We can’t just sit around and wait for the First Order to catch up to us.”

“But you’re hurting,” Nataaria says. Her voice is very small, now, the barest hint of her nose poking out of his shirt collar.

He cups a hand around her tiny body instinctively, a familiar motion already. “So are you,” Finn whispers. If he can feel the vornskr’s pain so many systems away from the _Finalizer,_ what must Nataaria have been feeling this whole time? They don’t even know if Poe’s found a way off of Jakku yet. “We’re gonna go find Poe for you, yeah? I’ll be alright.”

Rey’s hand on his shoulder makes him pause, leaning against the wooden door for support. Finn’s entire body feels loose with the after-image of pain, muscles refusing to work properly and his head still swimming with fog. But there’s something tight in Rey’s expression, and she keeps shooting glances at the chest in the corner. “You go on ahead, Finn. We’ll catch up with you, Kaz just wants to check something out first,” she says.

Kazmiir snorts inelegantly but doesn’t say a word, so Finn hauls the door open and staggers through.

 

\--

 

“Those beasts,” Maz spits when she finds them in the chaos of battle. She surveys the rubble of her empire with a snarl on her face and shoots an approaching Stormtrooper dead center on his chest plate. The trooper falls, dead in an instant.

Finn is still reeling from the red beams of light that had streaked across the sky. The rest of the galaxy will probably take weeks to understand the full depth of that sight, but Finn? Finn was there, he helped build that weapon, he knows exactly how devastating six red beams shooting through space can be.

The diminutive pirate jerks her head towards one of the few castle walls still standing. “Come, follow me,” she says urgently, leading them over. There’s the barest hint of an opening left in the toppled stonework, walls barely holding each other up, and Maz slips through easily. Finn follows her through.

“Where’s Rey?” Han asks, the last of them to make it through the gap and struggling to catch up. Maz Kanata moves faster than a being her size should be able, scurrying down the trembling hallways with angry steps.

She waves a hand dismissively. “Gone. Into the forest. She saw something she wasn’t ready for, and took off. I think the droid followed her.”

“What!” Finn yelps.

“We have more important things to worry about,” Maz pants, and opens a door to a familiar-looking room. Chewie warbles grumpily as he tries to fit in the doorway behind her, and Nataaria makes a startled chirping sound when Finn accidentally jostles her. “I’ve had this _forever_ , kept it locked away. Waiting for the right person to come and claim it.”

Finn narrows his eyes when he sees her crouch down in front of a battered-looking wooden chest. She flips the lid open, lifting out the gleaming metal hilt inside with reverential hands. Beneath it, there’s a worn pair of glasses nearly identical to the ones adorning her face. Maz takes those as well.

“Maz…” Han says warily. Caritia snarls.

Instead of presenting them to her fellow smuggler, like Finn expects, Maz Kanata turns around and offers both objects to _him_. “Take them,” she insists. “Keep them safe. We all have a part to play in the coming events.”

“But I—what?” Finn asks. His knees feel weak. He doesn’t understand any of this.

Maz smiles at him, and for the first time since he met the pirate it feels approving. “You’ll figure it out, boy. When the time is right. And trust in the Force, it will help you.”

“I’m supposed to just…trust in a mythical energy wave? When did that ever help?”

 

\--

 

The first indication Finn has that maybe they’re not completely screwed isn’t Han staring mysteriously out over the water. It isn’t Chewie howling ferociously and punching one of the Stormtroopers holding them prisoner in the face. It isn’t even Caritia’s joyous voice, yowling “It’s the Resistance! They’ve found us!”

Nataaria squirms against his chest, tiny ears pitched forward. “Poe,” she says breathlessly. “Poe!”

When he follows her gaze across the beach, Finn sees a squadron of X-Wings sweeping towards them over the waterfront. The fighters are keeping low, hugging the water, to stay off of the First Order’s scanners. There are so many ships they fill the horizon, a long line of black shapes speeding towards the castle ruins.

Green laserfire scores the ground, blasting Finn’s former brothers off their feet and arcing through the air to meet the red blasts of the TIE fighters rising to combat the new threat. Finn takes advantage of the distraction, snatching the lightsaber Maz had given him out of a brother’s dead hand and his blaster out of another. He whoops in delight, watching the X-Wing pilots dart through the sky, slower but much more gracefully than their opponents. The leader of the squadron pilots an entirely-black ship, darting and weaving through Takodana’s sky like gravity can’t touch them, taking out enemy TIEs left and right before they can do any damage to the people on the ground.

Finn has a feeling he knows who that is, leading the skirmish, and his feeling’s confirmed when Nataaria flaps her delicate wings and tries to leap into the air.

It breaks his heart to do it. It really does. But she’s going to hurt herself if she gets in the middle of that battle, might even die, and Finn can’t stand the thought of seeing her tiny form smashed against the hull of one of those ships. He shucks the jacket off his shoulders and catches Nataaria up in it, wrapping the leather around her securely so she can’t get away.

She writhes against his hold, howling. “No,” Nataaria screams, “Poe! _Poe!_ ”

“You can’t go to him yet,” Finn says desperately. Nataaria’s panicked struggling is hurting him someplace deep in his soul, a place he hadn’t thought anybody but the vornskr able to reach. “Nataaria, you _can’t_. You’ll die.”

“I don’t care!” she howls at him.

Swearing under his breath, Finn tucks her jacket-wrapped bundle against his chest and adjusts the blaster so he can fire it one handed. Han and Chewie are busy subduing the remaining Stormtroopers and there are limp bodies everywhere he looks. Maz’s once mysterious and ancient castle is nothing more than a pile of toppled rubble and bloodstained flags.

Maz herself is nowhere in sight. Her pirate entourage is dead or dying, and most of the ships have taken brutal damage from TIE cannons. When Finn casts an assessing eye over the battlefield, he notices a dark Lambda-class shuttle that he’d swear wasn’t there ten minutes ago. Its presence sends a shiver of terror down his spine.

Kylo Ren.

“Let me go, Finn, let me go!” Nataaria spits, wriggling and squirming relentlessly. Finn shushes her absently, every sense on high alert, searching for the presence of the First Order’s most unpredictable weapon. But there’s no black-clad figure in sight, no spitting red lightsaber swinging to cleave him in two. No threat left, all of the enemy troopers defeated by the Resistance fighters.

Just Han Solo and his feline daemon, frozen midstep, staring at Kylo Ren’s shuttle like it’s their worst nightmare come true.

The man himself—is Kylo Ren a man? After the massacre on Jakku, Finn would argue that he’s a monster—sweeps out of the woods imperiously. There’s a cream-clothed body lying limp in his arms, a bright splash of feathers the only thing to tell Finn who it is. The shuttle ramp lowers to the ground with a hiss of hydraulics; Ren doesn’t bother to look around as he stomps towards it.

“ _Rey!”_ he tries to shout, but panic clogs his lungs. _“REY!”_

He doesn’t know when he started running, only that he is. Gasping and racing over heaps of loose stones in a desperate prayer that he can get there in time. The bundle of jacket and bat dæmon bumps against his chest with every step, and Finn apologizes mentally to Nataaria a thousand times over, but he doesn’t stop. Can’t stop. He has to get to Rey.

The Lambda’s ramp raises back into the ship’s belly slowly, like it’s taunting Finn. The last glimpse he catches inside is the ominous sweep of Kylo Ren’s black cloak. For the first time, it occurs to Finn as strange that Ren’s daemon didn’t follow him to the planet’s surface.

 

\--

 

Eventually, BB-8 trundles out of the Takodanan foliage, beeping mournfully to itself the entire time.

Finn, who still has no idea what the little droid is saying, nods and drops a companionable hand against the white and orange dome when BB-8 rolls up alongside him. A large Resistance-style shuttle had landed ten minutes ago, a handful of important-looking people disembarking in a hurry, and now the wreckage was being combed for survivors. Han and Chewie had gone with them, while Finn had elected to linger behind.

He doesn’t know if he’s ready to meet the Resistance yet. A large part of him, the part that isn’t replaying Nataaria’s desperate attempt to reunite with Poe, is gibbering in terror and wishing he could run the fuck away from all of this. Maybe he will, once he convinces all of these strangers to help him get Rey out of the clutches of the First Order.

Maybe he’ll make a little pitstop on his way, take out as many of the First Order’s strongholds as he can before he disappears entirely into the Outer Rim. Maybe he’ll break the vornskr daemon out of the _Finalizer’s_ kennel. She doesn’t deserve a lifetime of being locked up and tortured just for being connected to him, after all.

A wave of warm air rustles over him. When Finn turns to look, he finds the black X-Wing from the battle settling into its landing struts and the cockpit being peeled open. The pilot emerges before his ladder fully descends, jumping the last four feet to the ground and tossing his helmet carelessly to the side. Tousled curls and a hawkish nose emerge, a wide delighted smile curling across a handsome face. Flight suit orange suits him, Finn thinks. He doesn’t even try to stop his answering grin.

This time, he tosses Nataaria gently into the air.

She hangs there for a moment, suspended weightlessly, and then streaks towards Poe faster than Finn can track with his eyes. “Poe Dameron, you _empty-skulled_ nerfherder!” Nataaria shrieks, hurtling into Poe’s stomach hard enough to knock him back several steps with a loud oomph. She alights again, circling the pilot’s head a couple times and clipping his nose and ears with her hooked wingtips. “What in the blazes were you thinking!”

Finn tugs the jacket back on now that it’s no longer needed to prevent wayward dæmons from injuring themselves, shoving his hands in the pockets. He tries to pretend he’s casually meandering in Poe’s direction, but BB-8 ruins that impression immediately. The droid makes good time across the torn up landscape for a ball, knocking into Poe’s legs and bleeping incessantly.

Poe laughs at them all. “I’m sorry, Nat,” he says affectionately, running two fingers down her spine ever so gently once she settles in the hollow between his neck and shoulder. The collar of Poe’s orange flight suit cradles her perfectly. “I had to keep you safe.”

She smacks him in the face with her wing.

He knows from experience just how much that one hurts. “Poe Dameron,” Finn says, trying to sound like he isn’t relieved as hell to see the guy in one piece.

Poe’s entire face lights up. “Finn, buddy!” he laughs. “It’s so good to see you alive. How’d you make it off Jakku?”

“With a little help from your friends, here.” Finn nods at Nataaria and BB-8 companionably. The droid lets off a long string of chatter, making Poe laugh, his entire face crinkling up. “And a new one we met on the way.”

“Yeah? Who?” Poe looks around curiously.

Finn takes a deep breath. It’s now or never. “Poe, I need your help.”

 


	4. isasha

Just like when they escaped the _Finalizer_ , Poe is instantly able to see right through him. “Your friend was taken prisoner, weren’t they,” he says shrewdly.

Finn nods, hot guilt swamping his chest. He’s still holding the lightsaber in one hand, blaster in the other. Neither weapon had helped him keep Rey safe, not in the end. “By Kylo Ren. And Rey’s so strong, and brave, and it’s my fault she’s even in this mess—”

“Whoa, buddy, slow it down,” Poe cuts him off. He’s grinning fondly, and while a little pale the pilot looks worlds better than he did on the _Finalizer_. Maybe it’s just that he’s not fresh from being tortured by Kylo Ren, but somehow Finn doesn’t think so. There’s a curious fluttering in his stomach.

BB-8 bleeps urgently, knocking into Poe’s leg for attention.

Poe kneels down, turning his focus onto his droid and resting an affectionate hand on the metal dome. “It’s good to see you too, Beebee,” he says, warmth suffusing his voice. “I was real scared the First Order got their nasty hands on you.”

BB-8 ‘blats’ negatively.

“Well, if they’d turned you into spare parts then I wouldn’t have a copilot, now would I?” Poe asks teasingly. The little droid bumps against his fingers, whirring, and a small panel on its front slides open. Craning his neck, Finn can just barely make out a slim data-drive and what looks like an antique knife inside. Poe stares at the contents in amazement. “I don’t believe it,” he says.

The wonder in Poe’s eyes when he turns to look up at Finn sends sparks skittering through Finn’s chest.

“You completed my mission,” Poe breathes. “Finn…”

The next thing Finn knows, he’s being dragged into a hug and Nataaria is squawking as she’s squished between them. She wriggles free, wings brushing Finn’s jaw as she takes to the sky and circles around their heads. A shudder works its way down Poe’s spine, and when he pulls back enough to stare Finn in the face there’s a new sort of awe hidden in his expression.

“It was you. I was so worried about Nat, but you had her the whole time,” he says. His hands clench on the lapels of Finn’s borrowed jacket.

Finn shrugs, careful not to displace Poe’s grip. “I had to keep her safe for you.”

“Ha!” Nataaria says. She settles atop Poe’s head, sending his helmet-tousled curls into disarray and grinning fiercely at Finn. “More like Rey keeping all of us safe. If it weren’t for her, we would’ve been caught all the way back on Jakku.”

Poe rolls his eyes, but the look on his face is fond. “Thank you for taking care of her. And I thought I told you to stay hidden?” He directs the question upwards.

His little bat sniffs primly. “He tried to tell me and BB-8 you were dead. Me. Your _dæmon_.”

The open amusement on Poe’s face makes Finn shift his weight anxiously. His movement breaks them apart, Poe stepping back to stand by BB-8 and leaving Finn feeling unmoored, drifting out into the black.

  
“I learned my lesson?” he tries weakly, and Poe laughs.

Nataaria whispers something too low for Finn to make out the words, Poe nodding along in consideration, and her tiny ears twitch with agitation. The remaining X-Wings in Poe’s squadron scream overhead, performing one final sweep for enemy combatants.

BB-8 shrieks back at them in Binary.

“Dameron!”

Finn whips around to the sound of Poe’s dejected, “Aw, kriff.” There’s a woman storming towards them, small in stature but dressed in a general’s uniform with her graying hair wrapping around her head in an intricate braid. Her face, tiny wrinkle lines betraying her age, is creased into an expression of outraged disbelief.

Han and Chewie trail behind the general, identical disgruntled frowns on their faces. In the nebulous space between them and the tiny Resistance leader, Han’s Caritia pads across the rubble-strewn ground. There’s a regal bird perched on Caritia’s shoulders, rich violet wings spread for balance and contrasting with his white-flecked breast. The general’s dæmon, Finn assumes, and wonders if he can sneak back to the _Falcon_ without being noticed.

 “I told you to stay on base,” the general says sternly. For a woman who barely comes up to Finn’s shoulder, she somehow manages to convey utter disappointment in Poe. “You know separation sickness is a serious thing, Commander. Dr. Kalonia was right to confine you to medical.”

“But General!” Poe protests.

“ _No,_ ” she says. Her dæmon flares his magnificent wings, feathers mantled.

Poe tips his head forward enough that Nataaria loses her balance, chattering at him angrily when she slips into the general’s view. “Nataaria was here,” he says plainly, eyes cutting between the general and Han behind her, grim-faced and standoffish. “The entire army couldn’t have kept me away.”

She considers them for a long moment. Finally, she sighs. “That aside, a Commander should know better than to land in enemy territory on an unsanctioned runway. It’s a security risk, Dameron, you know that.”

“And you know better than to lead an incursion yourself. That’s what delegation is for,” Poe counters.

The general rolls her eyes at him. Her dæmon alights from Caritia’s back, swooping a low orbit around her petite figure before settling on her shoulder with a rattling hiss. He dwarfs her immediately, folding his huge wings down and swiveling his purple head to survey their surroundings.

Caritia makes a discontent little grumbling sound under her breath, tail lashing back and forth.

“You must be the ex-Stormtrooper I’ve been hearing so much about,” the general says, turning her attention to Finn with a tight smile. “Thank you for all your help, both here and freeing Poe on the _Finalizer._ I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”

Finn does his best to smile back. He’s keenly aware of the lightsaber in his hand, of how he’d failed to keep Rey safe when he _knows_ what the First Order is capable of. “Just doing the right thing, ma’am,” he says demurely.  

BB-8 stutters out a long series of beeps, and Poe leans into Finn’s space with a conspiratorial grin. “Luke Skywalker is General Organa’s brother,” he says in a stage whisper. “She’s been leading the search for him for years. We think it’s so she can be the first to tell him how much of an idiot he’s been.”

Finn cringes. He isn’t sure whether he expects General Organa to slap Poe for his insolence or start yelling, but in his experience you don’t speak like that about a commanding officer and get away unscathed. Especially not a _general_.

Surprisingly, Organa does neither. Instead, she laughs.

Han explains, after he’s gotten a long look at Finn’s politely baffled face. “The pilot’s right, kid,” he says uncomfortably. In Finn’s Galactic History lectures, they’d been given dossiers on the most famous leaders of the Rebel Alliance—to learn from the Rebel scum’s successes and develop counterstrategies—and Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan had had one of the largest datafiles of them all. The information had listed her as married to General Solo a couple years after the Battle of Endor, but not whether they’d gotten divorced any time in the intervening years. Judging by their dæmons’ interactions, Finn is inclined to believe they’re still together. Han swallows thickly, glances down at his Caritia, and continues, “Luke’s the last one to run away from a fight. What happened was never his fault, and we should’ve made sure he understood that. Me, on the other hand…”

“We’ll get to you when we’re back on base,” Organa says sternly. Her bird dæmon makes a croaking complaint, and Chewie warbles something back in Shyriiwook, grip tightening on his bowcaster.

Finn is _so_ confused.

Slipping down to Poe’s shoulder and then across to Finn’s, Nataaria leans close enough for her soft fur to brush his face. “Don’t let them fool you, they’re really happy underneath the grumpy faces,” she complains fondly. Finn shivers, catching Poe’s answering shudder out of the corner of his eye. “Helping our Poe isn’t the only thing you’ve done that the General is grateful for.”

Organa is watching them with surprise on her face, Finn suddenly realizes. Then the laugh lines around her eyes crinkle, and one of her hands strokes over her dæmon’s white-feathered head. “Peace, Trisales,” she says when he croaks something at Nataaria in dæmonspeak, his talons clenching on her shoulder. Organa doesn’t even flinch.

Nataaria snaps back at Trisales, the consonants harsh on Finn’s ears, and drops off of Finn’s shoulder like a stone. Poe catches her in his hands effortlessly, cradling her close, murmuring reassurances under his breath.

Scrabbling desperately for a way to change the subject, Finn glances down and remembers the droid he’d helped smuggle halfway across the galaxy. And what BB-8 is carrying. “Um,” he says, glad his dark skin hides the blush lighting up across his cheeks. “If you’re talking about delivering the map to you, I mean, I really didn’t do all that much. Rey’s the one who saved BB-8, and got us off of Jakku, and—”

“The map? You’ve got it?” General Organa interrupts. Her entire face is alight with hope.

Squealing in excitement, BB-8 rockets out from behind Poe and regales the general with a long string of Binary. She smiles indulgently at the astromech, patting it on the head and thanking it for its courage. When she straightens, Han rests a gentle hand on the shoulder not occupied by Trisales.

“I’ve seen it, Leia,” Han says quietly. “It’s not complete. I don’t even recognize any of the systems on it.”

Her shoulders droop under the sudden weight, but General Organa looks Finn in the eye and smiles. “Well, we’ll just have to see what we’ve got when we get back to base. Are you coming with us, or shall we drop you off at a spaceport on the way back?”

Finn thinks about Nataaria and Poe, and how far he’s come for them already. He thinks about Rey and Kazmiir, prisoners of Kylo Ren because of _him,_ and wonders who will launch a rescue mission for them if he doesn’t push for it? Then he thinks about the inexorable creeping threat of the First Order, spreading through the entire galaxy; they’d reduced Maz’s pirate empire to rubble just to get their hands on him, destroyed an entire star system of people to cripple the New Republic. What new horrors will they unleash if people don’t fight back, if _Finn_ doesn’t fight back?

With all that in mind, Finn’s choice is easy. He takes a step closer to Poe, brushing his shoulder against the pilot’s, and nods in answer. “I’m coming with you,” Finn says confidently.

Like he’d be anywhere else.

 

\--

 

Finn hunches his shoulders, tugging his jacket closer to ward off the sudden chill. Poe had said he could keep it, that it ‘suited him,’ and then had been ordered back into the air by General Organa. BB-8 and Nataaria had gone with him in the X-Wing back to the Resistance base.

The general herself had disappeared with a golden protocol droid into her convoy ship, leaving Han and Chewie piloting the _Falcon_ with Finn as their only passenger. After the events of the past couple days, all the new friends he’s made, he finds that being alone doesn’t hold quite the appeal he’d imagined.

Finn misses Rey’s bright eyes and Kazmiir’s sonorous humming in the background. He misses Poe’s companionable arm around his shoulders, standing solidly next to him under the general’s regard. He misses Nataaria’s warmth against his skin.

 “You know we’ll get her back, right? Leia doesn’t leave people behind.”

Finn jerks his head up from staring at the tabletop in the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s lounge, startled. “Hmm?”

“Rey,” Han elaborates gruffly, sliding into a seat opposite Finn with a grimace. “Give Leia a day or two to hear back from the scout ship, and then there’ll be a mission to rescue her. I guarantee it.”

“Rey doesn’t have a day or two, that’s the problem.”

“What are you talking about? Of course she does. Pardon me for assuming, but Rey’s tough; it’ll take more than a couple hours of torture to get her to talk,” Han argues. Caritia prowls a lazy circuit of the room, tip of her tail flicking from side to side, and drifts over to settle on the floor between their chairs. Her yellow eyes stare up at Finn, luminous in the artificial lighting.

Finn shakes his head at them both. “I know the First Order. I _know_ Kylo Ren. There’s a good reason Poe sent Nataaria away with BB-8 on Jakku.” A cold shiver shoots down his spine.

Caritia growls, a low rumble of sound along the floor grates, and there’s a pained grimace on Han’s face.  

“Just ‘cause you were a Stormtrooper doesn’t mean you know Kylo Ren.”

Finn takes a deep breath. “I was raised by the First Order. I’ve spent my entire life under the heel of Kylo Ren,” he says, forcing himself to meet Han’s eyes. “You didn’t see what Poe looked like when I broke him out of that cell. That’s how I know.”

“Leia told me that was at least half separation sickness,” Han informs him.

He thinks that if separation sickness is what it sounds like, then it’s a fucking miracle that his Trooper brothers and he made it out of childhood. It’s a miracle he’s made it this far from the Order’s grasp. He struggles to remember that far back, but Finn’s earliest memories are a wash of fear and pain, that all-pervasive pain that never went away, and the bone deep knowledge that there was supposed to be _somebody there_ to make him feel less alone. He’d forgotten that instinct over time, learned to tune out the pain, but there are some things that even the First Order can’t train away.

 _Han does not know separation sickness_ , Finn tells himself, _none of these people do._

He says, instead, “If they hadn’t separated voluntarily, the First Order would have done it for them.” This is a fact, as certain to Finn as his accuracy with a blaster. This is a truth he can feel deep in his bones.

Han leans back in his chair, rubbing a tired hand over his face. He sighs.

It’s Caritia who says, “Well, that explains some things.”

“What do you mean?” Finn asks.

“Stormtroopers don’t have dæmons, kid, everybody knows that,” Han says brusquely. The craggy lines of his face seem deeper, suddenly. “The Empire’s army of bucketheads was the same way. We always thought that meant they were a species that didn’t need dæmons, cuz the old troopers—the _clone_ troopers of the Republic, they all had dæmons.”

Finn stares at him, feeling sick down to the pit of his stomach. “We have dæmons,” he says clearly, making sure to enunciate every word. “ _I_ have a dæmon.”

“Well…shit.”

He scrapes a laugh from the bottom of his soul, barely a breath of sound. “Yeah.”

“And you’re…” Han trails off, waving a hand in a complicated gesture Finn has no hope of parsing. When Finn arches an eyebrow, the smuggler lets out an explosive breath. “Intercised. They cut your dæmons away?”

“No.”

 

Caritia lets out an awful keening noise. When Finn looks down, she’s leaning whole-bodied against Han’s leg and her ears are pinned tight to her skull. Han doesn’t seem any less horrified by Finn’s answer.

It’s the most he’s ever seen them touch.

“How is that even possible? You should be catatonic,” Han wonders. His hand clenches in Caritia’s short fur. There’s a touch of disgust in his voice—but not for Finn. For what the First Order has wrought.

 

He shrugs. “There’s some concoction they made us drink as kids. Made everything go numb and kind of floaty. They weaned us all off it by the time we got to the Academy, and by then...”

 

“Shit, kid.” Han curses some more under his breath.

 

“We didn’t know any better.”

 

Finn tucks his hands into his jacket pockets, hunching his shoulders defensively—and is startled when his fingers brush cold metal. He pulls out the antique glasses Maz had given him and blinks at them, surprised. In the rush of battle and meeting the Resistance in the aftermath, he’d mentally put aside the issue of the weird old space pirate and her freaky glasses.

He holds them up to his eyes curiously. Around each of the lenses is inscribed a series of tiny drawings, like nothing Finn’s ever seen before, and when rotated they act like a dial.

“What _are_ these?” he asks.

Han frowns at the glasses, like they’ve caused him some personal insult. “Maz has always known things she shouldn’t have any clue about,” he says slowly. “We asked her, once, and she said she’d been gifted an alethiometer by the witches of Dathomir.”

“An alethiometer?”

“Force sensitive truth telling device,” Caritia offers. She’s still pressed against Han’s leg from sternum to hip, but her triangular ears are arced forward and her tail sways lazily across the floor grating.

“It’s all mumbo jumbo to me,” Han says grouchily. “I’ve seen it, I know it works, but hell if I understand it.”

“But why would she give it to _me_?” Finn gives one of the lenses a lazy spin and watches the images click around and around. It drifts to a stop, pauses for a long moment on a little stick figure of a man, and then starts spinning again. In the _other direction._

“Kriffing hell!”

Han snorts. “What did you expect, kid? You saw Maz using hers.”

Under Finn’s anxious gaze, the alethiometer lens bleeds momentum until it lands on the tiny engraving of a pair of scales.

 

\--

 

“Medical, first,” General Organa orders when she meets them on the runway. The rebel base is comprised of a series of sprawling, low slung buildings with flat swathes of gravel surrounding them. A familiar fleet of X-Wings is nestled between it and the forest, bustling with pilots and mechanics checking the ships over for battle damage. Off in the distance, Finn can see a large open space with targets set up for blaster practice. “Commander Dameron reported that the two of you crash-landed in the Jakku desert. Force knows what kind of injuries you sustained from _that_ , nevermind the fact that you were just in a battle. You too, Chewie—I could see that blaster wound from a mile away.”

Her Trisales swoops off her shoulder, talons clicking as he lands on the gravel and hobbles forward. Caritia trots down the _Falcon’s_ ramp to meet him, purring.

“Oh, come _on_ , ‘Itia,” Han mutters to her. Finn probably isn’t meant to hear, but. He’s half a step behind Han the entire way down the ramp, Chewie bringing up the rear. There’s no way for him _not_ to hear.

Caritia growls, butting the side of her face against Trisales’ white-flecked breast. He warbles in return, brushing her ribs with an elegant wing.

Leia crosses her arms across her chest, sighing at them. But Finn catches the glint of warmth in her eyes, the smile hidden in the corner of her mouth threatening to escape. _Your daemon is your soul,_ he thinks. _A soul cannot lie_ , he thinks.

 _Your daemon is the truest expression of yourself,_ he realizes.

 

\--

 

Poe’s arguing fiercely with a gray haired human medic, golden-horned goat dæmon prancing around her feet, when Finn is finally escorted into the medcenter by a red skinned Twi’lek.

Finn checks him over quickly, concerned, but Poe looks fine—better than fine, actually. The color has returned to his face and all signs of the torture he underwent on the _Finalizer_ have been washed away. There’s a neat line above his left eyebrow where the skin has been glued together, but that’s the only visible injury besides a split lip. Nataaria is perched atop his head once again; she coos when she sees Finn through the doorway.

The sound catches Poe’s attention immediately. He breaks off from the dispute and tries to stand from his seat at the foot of a white-sheeted bed; the medic forces him back down with a firm hand on his shoulder. “I’m fine, Doc, let me—Finn!” Poe says.

“You are _not_ fine, Dameron! Force only knows what you’ve done to your bond now, so sit down and let me work,” the medic insists.

Chewie follows Finn into the room, grouchily informing the medics of the injustice done to his wounded arm by Finn’s nervous hands. At least, Finn assumes that’s what the growls and rumbles and waving of bandaged limbs means.

“You’ve got some prior medical training, then,” the Twi’lek says with surprise, glancing between Finn and the Wookie admiringly. He leads Finn to the bed next to Poe’s and gestures for Finn to take a seat.

He does, cringing at the overloud rustle of bedsheets beneath him. The medcenter is chilly, and the glare of the lights reminds him uncomfortably of the First Order’s medical bays. “Enough to know I’m mission-ready,” he says defensively. He hopes he isn’t about to be decommissioned after just getting here. That would suck bantha balls.

The medic, now taking Poe’s vitals with a funny-looking blue scanner, scoffs and looks over at Finn. “Let us be the judge of that. You just relax and let Serre do his job.”

Serre smiles and thanks the droid that wheels a medical cart over to them. His russet deer dæmon dodges nimbly out of the way. “Any injuries to report?” he asks, picking up his own scanner and a datapad to make notes on.

Finn shrugs. He’d come out of the crash on Jakku remarkably unscathed, and there had been enough medical supplies stashed away on the _Falcon_ to take care of them after they’d escaped the rathtars. But the battle on Takodana…he hadn’t felt the pain immediately, too full of adrenaline. “I took a couple good hits from a riot baton,” he finally admits stiffly. The scanner results will make that all too clear.

Poe hisses in sympathy.

“Your ribs are definitely bruised,” Serre agrees. He frowns at the scanner, taps it twice and reruns a couple tests. “Dr. Kalonia? Can you confirm this reading for me?”

The medic finishes up Poe’s examination, tucking away her equipment and handing the cart off to a medical droid to put away. “You got lucky, Dameron,” she says severely. “By all rights you should be catatonic right now. If you hadn’t found your dæmon when you did, I shudder to think what kind of condition you’d be in. It’s too soon to know if your bond will return to its previous state, but I think it unlikely.” Dr. Kalonia gives Poe a sympathetic look, patting him on the shoulder, and steps over to Finn’s bedside.

“What’s the problem?” she asks Serre, who tilts his scanner in her direction in response.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Finn bites back the panic curdling in his gut. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad, right? He feels fine. Situation normal, aside from the tender ribs. If there was anything really, seriously, wrong with him he would have felt it. Unless it’s some First Order trap they don’t tell the troopers about—a tracking device hidden under his skin, maybe, or a time-delayed explosive device to eliminate the threat. His hands clench into tense fists in his lap.

Dr. Kalonia takes the scanner, running several new tests and frowning with each subsequent result. Her dæmon’s ears twitch. Finally, she sets the scanner down on the medical cart and turns to Finn. “How long have you been away from your dæmon?” she asks bluntly.

Finn stiffens. _That’s_ what they’re so concerned about? “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because readings like these are unheard of.” Dr. Kalonia picks up a different instrument and waves it over him from head to toe, scowling at the diagnostic and trying a third. “You shouldn’t even be _conscious_ right now, let alone able to fight.”

Over on the other bed, Nataaria tumbles into Poe’s lap in shock.

“I was a Stormtrooper, ma’am. I was raised to always be prepared for combat,” Finn says stonily.

Dr. Kalonia considers him for a long, breathless moment, then nods and takes a step back. “I see. I’d like to run some further analysis, if that’s okay with you, and holocall a colleague of mine who specializes in understanding Dust. Commander Dameron is staying here overnight for observation—I’m sure he’d appreciate someone to keep him company.” She waits for Finn to mumble his assent—further analysis? Kriff, maybe the Order really did do something to prevent him from leaving—before she heads for her office at a fast clip, goat dæmon at her heel.

 

\--

 

Poe waits approximately five minutes after Dr. Kalonia disappears before he grins at Finn, bright and sharp, and stands up from the bed. “Let’s go,” he says, wobbling once before he finds his balance. He heads for the door at a brisk walk.

“What,” Finn says to the empty air where he’d been standing.

“Well? We’ve got work to do,” Nataaria chirps, peering back at him over the crest of Poe’s shoulder.

Finn swears under his breath. “Poe! Where are you going? The medic said to stay here!”

“And?”

“And we should follow orders!” His heart starts racing at the very thought. Finn’s only been with the Resistance for a couple hours, and he used to be their enemy—how fast will they kick him out if he causes any trouble? How will he save Rey without their help?

Nataaria flutters off of Poe’s flight suit, performing a couple dizzying laps around Finn’s head.

“Finn,” she says slowly, like she thinks he’s being incredibly oblivious. “We are breaking out. We are going to the strategy session in ten minutes, and then we’re going to go save Rey and Kaz.”

“But we were ordered to stay,” he protests weakly.

Poe leans against the doorframe, presumably on the lookout for Dr. Kalonia’s return. “You were ordered to leave me in the hands of the First Order, and look how that’s turned out for you,” he says. “Sometimes you have to disobey orders. The General will understand that.”

Abruptly, Finn recalls what General Organa had said about Poe escaping medical to fight on Takodana. In light of that, this breakout is positively tame.

He follows without further protest. Nataaria nestles herself just out of sight under Poe’s collar, making a little rumbly sound that might be a purr. Poe meets his eyes with a tentative grin, something unspoken stretching between them, then opens the door and waves Finn inside.

Finn braces himself against the sudden wave of noise.

 

\--

 

The scouts were even quicker getting back than expected, Han tells them. The planet that Kylo Ren had retreated to was in the Minos Cluster, which had also been traced as the origin of the red beams that had reduced the Hosnian System to meteorites and cosmic dust. Finn frowns, and tugs his jacket closer to hide the shiver that runs down his back. He knows exactly where they’ve taken Rey.

Starkiller.                       

Finn memorized the base layout what feels like a lifetime ago, and can still recall it with perfect clarity. He says as much, adding that he knows how to take the base shields down to leave it unprotected, and when General Organa thanks him there’s a glitter of relief in her eyes.

They make a plan. Finn helps.

He doesn’t quite know how to feel about that. Sure, he hates the First Order, but he doesn’t hate his former brothers and sisters. Most of the technicians and deck officers were even…decent. All victims of the same system that screwed Finn over so badly. He knows that doesn’t absolve them of their crimes, that at least three quarters of them believe whole-heartedly in the First Order’s mission. In war, there are no innocents. Everyone currently on Starkiller is going to be dead by this time tomorrow.

Finn doesn’t want to kill anybody. He just wants to be free.

 

\--

 

“Nataaria told me about your dæmon,” Poe says.

He’s caught Finn out in front of the _Millennium Falcon_ , gearing up for the attack on Starkiller. They’re slated to leave in fifteen minutes, a couple hours ahead of the main attack force, and Finn can hear Han distantly shouting for him to hurry up already.

“Yeah?” Finn asks. He doesn’t see what the vornskr has to do with the mission to Starkiller. And much as he’d love to talk to Poe, they don’t have the time right now. Rey is waiting. “What about her?”

Poe shifts his weight. He’s changed into a fresh flight suit, helmet under his arm. Nataaria is curled up in a specially-padded pocket right under his respirator unit, only her bright eyes visible. “Just—I’m sorry, I didn’t even think to ask about her when we were back on the _Finalizer._ ”

“It’s fine. Han told me what the galaxy believes about Stormtrooper dæmons; how were you supposed to know?”

“I should have asked anyways,” Poe insists fiercely. He’s practically vibrating with intensity, leaning into the space between them like physical proximity is going to help him convince Finn to be upset. “The Resistance is _better_ than the First Order. How can we call ourselves ‘better’ when we treat people exactly the same?”

Finn rolls his eyes, because that line of thinking is painfully inaccurate. He rests a hand on the shorter man’s shoulder. “Poe, you aren’t treating me like the First Order did,” he says.

“But I—”

“Did you lock my dæmon up in the first place?” Finn asks him, hoping that spelling out the exact differences will help Poe see how wrong he is. _Maybe all that time in an X-Wing has resulted in oxygen deprivation_ , he muses. “Did you keep us apart except for mandatory health checks every month? Did you hurt her just so I would turn myself in?”

Poe’s expressive face displays a wide range of emotions in the span of a few seconds. He recognizes fear, anger, despair, relief, and a brief moment of hope; there are a few others that Finn doesn’t know well enough to put a name to.

“Don’t put the blame anywhere it doesn’t belong. The First Order did this to us,” Finn finishes sternly.

(Strictly speaking, yes, the First Order did this to them. But. Strictly speaking, Finn also chose to leave his dæmon behind. That’s on him. He doesn’t think pointing out that little detail will help Poe right now, though, so Finn holds his peace.)

“ _Thank_ you,” a muffled voice says fervently.

Nataaria wriggles her way out of her flight pouch, climbing up Poe’s respirator box so she can glare at her human. “I’ve been telling him the same thing since we left Takodana,” she grumbles to Finn. “He wouldn’t believe me.”

Poe rolls his eyes at her. “You’re my dæmon, you always try to make me feel better,” he argues.

“And I’m always right, too,” Nataaria points out. She thumps her wing against Poe’s hand when he tries to resettle her on his shoulder. “But let Finn convince you, if I can’t. You don’t need to take on the weight of this too.”

“I’m alright, Poe, really. And besides, I’m used to it,” Finn says earnestly.

Both man and dæmon freeze, staring at Finn in wide-eyed horror. Nataaria makes a squeaking noise, fluttering off of Poe’s flight suit and crashing into Finn’s chest in a bundle of fur. His hands rise to cradle her without a conscious decision, despite Rey’s words about not touching other people’s dæmons echoing in his ears. Finn hasn’t held her since Takodana, hasn’t even been conscious of missing her. There simply hasn’t been time, he’s been too busy. The shock of her fur is…startlingly warm against his palms. “Finn,” she says, achingly gentle. “Finn, nobody should be used to that.”

Finn’s cheeks burn. He’s thankful all over again for his dark skin. “I’ve never known any different.”

 _That_ makes Poe step closer, his eyes fixed on the sight of his dæmon clasped between Finn’s hands. He bites his lip, heat in his eyes when they meet Finn’s. “We’ll get her out,” he says fervently. “I swear to you, Finn, we’ll get her free.”

His stomach swoops pleasantly. Growing up in the barracks like he did, Finn’s had plenty of exposure to sex and its intricacies. The officers had restricted their ability to fuck, not eradicated it completely. Finn’s just never had anybody willing to practice with him. He’s unused to seeing desire directed at him by other people.

It’s…kind of nice, actually. He could get used to it. He _wants_ to get used to it.

There’s a swoopy feeling in Finn’s stomach. He’s used to relying on his gut instinct, has trained for years to hone his battle intuition into a precise machine, but this isn’t a battle sim. There’s no manual for these kinds of interactions. Just Poe looking at him like Finn personally hung the stars in the sky and Poe’s dæmon warm between Finn’s palms.

He takes the bare half step forward to close the distance between them, bringing a hand up to cradle the strong line of Poe’s jaw, and presses their lips together.

Poe freezes at the contact, holding his breath, like he needs a long minute to process Finn’s actions. His ears burn. He starts to pull away, flushing hotly with shame at misreading the situation so badly. But then Poe’s clutching at the lapels of his jacket, _Poe’s jacket_ , kissing him back with a fierce desperation.

As far as first kisses go, it’s pretty nice. At least, Finn thinks so. He hopes Poe agrees.

He hopes Poe wants to do it again.

Nataaria flaps her way out of Finn’s other hand, giggling and swooping dizzying circles around them as Finn finally draws back enough to gasp air into his lungs. There are stars in Poe’s eyes, a giddy little grin curling the corners of his mouth. “Huh,” he says.

“I hope that was okay,” Finn says.

Poe’s tiny grin grows into a proper smile. “Okay? That was perfect.”

“He’s still feeling guilty,” Nataaria chimes in. “Kiss him again.”

There really isn’t time. Finn’s been distracted too long as it is. “Later?” he asks nervously. “Think of it as incentive to come back from this mission.”

A dull red flush works its way across Poe’s cheeks. “Yes,” he says, nodding vigorously. “Definitely. Good incentive.”

“Because I want to kiss you again, I mean really, _really_ want to—it’s just, we don’t have time,” Finn adds, in a hurry now to explain himself. He doesn’t want Poe to think he _doesn’t_ want to kiss the pilot again, it’s just. Rey.

“Right. Um, good luck,” Poe says unsteadily. Still flushed a dull red, he jogs back to the fleet of X-Wings getting prepped for their own upcoming flight. Somehow, he does it without looking like he’s running away from Finn.

“Huh,” Han says from the ramp of the _Falcon_. Finn hadn’t even heard him walk up. “That explains some things.”

 

\--

 

Their landing on Starkiller is not the smoothest. Or the quietest. Or anything resembling stealthy at all, really. Even if they managed to stay off the radar detectors, the _Falcon_ just took out a mile-long swathe of forest. Somebody’s bound to look out a base window and notice.

“ _That’s_ what you call subtle?” Finn demands.

Chewie growls at him, grip twitching on his bowcaster.

Han grumbles his way out of the cockpit, Caritia on his heels, and heaves up one of the bags they’d loaded with explosives over his shoulder. The other bag gets slung over Chewie’s back, leaving Finn with a blaster in his shaking hands and the base schematics in his head. “You’ve got a plan, right, kid?” Han asks gruffly.

“Um. Yes. Technically,” he says, leading the way down the _Falcon_ ’s ramp. The planet Starkiller is built into is cold, snow falling wet and thick around them. Part of Finn thinks that’s good—the snow will muffle their footsteps and make them harder to pick up on radar. It’ll also leave a clear trail for any scouts to follow.

Caritia snorts, shaking herself vigorously. “What do you mean, technically? Do you have a plan or not?”

He has the beginnings of a plan. The flight had been long and quiet, giving Finn plenty of time to review his memorized schematics and figure out the most likely location for them to be holding Rey. He’d plotted them three potential ways to sneak into the base itself, depending on the current level of security, and a dozen routes from the shield generator to the prison blocks.

He just has no idea how to actually get the shields down. Yet.

“I have a plan,” Finn says, injecting confidence into his voice.  He studies the surrounding topography for a long minute, looking for landmarks, and uses those to orient himself on his mental map. Then he starts off in the direction of the nearest sewage outflow tunnel, pretending he can’t hear the grumbling old smugglers following on his tail.

 

\--

 

“I’m not leaving without Rey,” Finn insists again.

The shields are down. If he does nothing else for the Resistance, Finn’s accomplished that. The fleet of X-Wings, led by Poe and BB-8, will be able to complete their mission. And he’s glad he got the chance to stand up to Captain Phasma, even if he’d been half-terrified the whole time.

Han rolls his eyes and juts his chin at something behind Finn. He has to do it a couple times, before Finn realizes that it’s a meaningful gesture and not just a muscle tic.

“What?” he says, irritated at being questioned. They’d covered this in the sewage tunnels, _and_ while tracking down Phasma to bring down the shields. It really isn’t that difficult of a concept to grasp. “What does ‘this’ mean?” He mimics Han’s gesture agitatedly.

Han points wordlessly at something behind Finn, and he whips around to look.

 _Oh, thank the Force_ , he thinks.

Rey’s scaling the far wall of the TIE fighter bay, clambering nimbly over the recessed service panels. A fluorescent slash of feathering is wrapped around her waist. There’s a glass wall and the entire gulf of the hangar between them, but Finn feels relief sweep down his spine at the sight of her. His knees go momentarily weak.

He scouts the way into the fighter bay, Han and Chewie close on his heels. They end up about a floor above Rey, on the far side of the hangar, where the hallways join into an overhang that the regular Trooper patrols can’t see into. “Rey!” he hisses, crouching down to lean over the edge and catch her attention.

She looks up sharply at the sound of her name, eyes widening. Then she’s moving, scaling gracefully along the sheer vertical wall towards him. Finn has no idea how she does it, but within a couple minutes she pops up over the edge of the chasm and promptly hurtles herself into his arms.

“Finn!” she says, hushed but excited. “What are you doing here?”

“We came back for you,” Finn says. Rey is faintly shaking against him, drenched with sweat and adrenaline, but she’s warm. She’s alive. Kazmiir winds his way up to coil loosely around her shoulders, fluttering his triple-forked tongue at Finn.

Behind him, Chewie growls something that makes Rey pull back and look up at Finn with astonishment in her eyes.

“What?”

Rey cracks a fragile grin. “He says it was your idea,” she whispers.

The next thing Finn knows, Kazmiir is slipping down Rey’s right arm to where her hand is still clutching at Finn’s like a lifeline. The serpent pauses a moment, considering, and slithers forward just enough to coil around Finn’s wrist. The rasp of his scales is warm and dry against the back of Finn’s hand, and his beautiful feathering is silky soft. “Thank you,” Kazmiir says solemnly, his tail still wrapped around Rey’s forearm so that he’s linking their hands together.

Something achingly tender unfurls in Finn’s heart; he runs his thumb along Kazmiir’s side and marvels at how different the sensation is from holding Nataaria. Kazmiir shuts his eyes in a series of lazy blinks, cautious in his movements but arching just enough into Finn’s touch that he knows it’s welcomed.

There’s no surprise in Rey’s face at the actions of her dæmon, just a raw sort of gratefulness. “We thought you were gone,” she mumbles, leaning into Finn again. Her shoulders droop with relief, probably exhausted from engineering her own escape from the First Order.

He’s just glad he got there in time. Acting on impulse, Finn presses a kiss against her temple and tugs her into another hug. He thinks he wants to kiss her like he did with Poe, but now isn’t the time and he doesn’t know how she would feel about that. The last thing Finn wants to do is push unwanted advances on Rey.

Although, now he thinks about it, if they were really unwanted she’d probably just dump him on his ass.

“Ahem,” Han coughs. “Not to break up this moment, or anything, but there’s an air strike on the way. We should probably move.”`

They startle apart, Kazmiir disappearing under Rey’s loose shirt faster than Finn can track his progress. His face flushes with embarrassment, equally incriminating patches of red growing high on Rey’s cheekbones.

Caritia laughs at them.

Han grumbles something under his breath. It sounds a lot like “should’a just left the lot of you on Takodana, made you Maz’s problem.” Then, louder, “My buddy and I got two bags full of explosives, and we’re in an enemy base surrounded by guys who wanna kill us. Let’s go raise a little hell.”

Chewie howls his agreement, forgetting for a moment the need for secrecy, and Rey nods firmly next to Finn. He nudges their shoulders together, giving her a tentative grin, and says “Count us in,” when Rey smiles back at him.

 

\--

 

Rey clicks the last sabotaged panel back into place and scoots out of the air ducts, flushed with triumph. “That’ll slow ‘em down,” she says.

“What else can we rewire?” Kazmiir twitches his tail eagerly, scenting the air with long flickers of his tongue.

From where he’s keeping watch, Finn frowns. Ever since they landed on Starkiller he’s had a niggling feeling in the pit of his stomach. Like touching Nataaria—or that brief, delightful moment with Kazmiir—only stronger. Better. The answer finally comes to him.

The vornskr.

Finn knows the layout of Starkiller Base like the anatomy of a blaster, can plot seven different routes from this service panel to the kennels in the blink of an eye. Luckily, they only need one.

“This way,” he tells Rey and Kazmiir. “I’ve got a plan.”

They follow him silently, trusting him to guide them safely. Finn picks the safest direction he can, and prays that they don’t run into an odd patrol.

They don’t. Worse.

They run into General Hux.

“Back, back, back!” Finn hisses, pressing himself flat to the wall. In the hallway perpendicular, Hux storms past, his korrina dæmon snarling quietly at his heel. The General is in a mood—probably Ren’s fault, Finn thinks, the only one to rile him up so badly is the Knight—and, luckily for them, not paying very good attention to his surroundings. Behind Finn, Rey and Kazmiir are holding their breath; the normal sonorous hum of Kazmiir’s scales is absent, and Finn finds himself missing it.

Hux’s daemon’s tail lashes angrily all the way around the corner, flicking into view one last time before they stomp off to terrorize some poor ensign.

“Is he gone?” Rey hisses.

He waits another breathless moment, two, then nods. “Let’s go.”

Nothing else blocks their way the rest of the journey, thankfully. Finn steers their little party into the relative safety of Starkiller’s kennel and fights down the automatic shiver that runs down his spine at the sight of the Separation machine.

When Finn looks over, the expression on Rey’s delicate face is heart-wrenching. “What is this place?” she asks, horrified. She gives the silver Separation machine a wide berth as they move into the other room. The walls lined with cages just disgust her worse.

“Monsters,” Kazmiir spits, all his feathers puffed up in agitation. His humming rises to a tremulous pitch. “How dare they?”

The dæmons stir restlessly in their cages at the sound of his voice. Finn follows the relentless tug in his gut across the room, past the rows of daemons all talking over each other in hushed, excited tones and pacing the confines of their cages. He drops to his knees, peering into a positively tiny cell above a rattling blackstalker’s enormous crate. The vornskr barely has enough room to turn around, much less pace, but she rushes to the door nonetheless.

 _You!_ she says. Her voice is a balm against the fear and pain that has haunted Finn all his life. _You came back!_

 _Of course I did,_ Finn whispers. He tugs roughly at the lock, wishing he knew who kept the keys or how to pick locks or _something_. A gentle touch to his shoulder startles him, and he twists to look up.

“Let me,” Rey says gently. She holds up two slim slivers of metal, and slides them gently into the lock as soon as Finn scoots out of the way. It’s the work of barely a minute—the lock clicks open, Rey swings the door open, and the vornskr practically bowls her over leaping at Finn.

She’s even thinner than the last time he saw her, covered in fine red welts. One of her ears is torn and jagged, and the very tip of her whip-like tail is missing. Shivering in the shelter of his embrace, the vornskr looks a pitiful sight.

But warmth blooms between them, starting in his hands and spreading throughout his entire body, and there’s peace in her eyes when she leans up and licks his chin.

 _You shouldn’t have,_ she whispers, words meant for his ears alone. _But I’m glad you did._

“What’s her name, Finn?” Rey asks, raising her voice a little to be heard over the growing tide of Trooper dæmon voices, all clamoring to be let out of their own cages.

Finn looks at the vornskr. His dæmon looks back at him. It’s never occurred to him that she should have a name—he feels shame for that oversight now, when he’s learned so much about dæmons and has touched both Poe’s and Rey’s. “She doesn’t have one,” he admits sheepishly, and the vornskr shoves her head against his chest. “How are dæmons usually named?”

“Well, traditionally, your parents’ dæmons would’ve named her,” Rey says slowly. Kazmiir wraps himself around her right arm, triangular head resting on the back of her hand so he can better inspect Finn’s dæmon.

“Traditionally?”

Kazmiir gives them both a serpent’s grin. “What’s so important about tradition? I’ve always been partial to the name Isasha myself, what do you think?”

The vornskr considers it for a long moment, her tail twitching against Finn’s leg. Then she looks up at him nervously. _What do you think?_ she asks.

 _I think it’s your name, so you get to choose._ Finn carefully strokes down the hard bumps of her spine, keeping his touch as gentle as possible. She still shivers at the press of his fingertips.

_I like it._

He beams at Kazmiir, who has twisted himself into a coiled knot around Rey’s wrist in the interim. “She likes it. Isasha,” Finn says, tasting the name on his tongue. The vornskr’s tail thumps against his thigh in agreement.

Rey’s eyes are swimming with delight. She holds up her set of lockpicks, grinning conspiratorially at them. “Han said to raise some hell, right? What’ll cause more trouble than a base overrun by dæmons?”

 _I like the way she thinks_ , Isasha says, and Finn is helpless to do anything but agree.

 

\--

 

They get back to the TIE hangar too late to save Han and Caritia.

Kylo Ren looks up at Finn as he skids to a stop at the balcony railing, Rey at his back. The Knight isn’t wearing his mask, for once, and his face is pale underneath long strands of inky black hair. Just off his shoulder, his dæmon hovers, an enormous yellow and blue reptavian with four bulky wings. The dæmon spits something at Caritia in dæmonspeak, flapping his wings malevolently, and Caritia shakes her head so hard her horns dance from side to side.

Han and Kylo are holding the Knight’s sickly red lightsaber, together, two sets of hands clasped around the hilt. The sound of his voice carries up to Finn and Rey, pleading with Kylo to come home already. Finn’s at the wrong angle to see the expression on the old smuggler’s face, but he can’t imagine it’s anything good.

At his feet, Isasha snarls. On the trip back, Finn had explained what all had happened and what he’d learned since he’d fled the _Finalizer_ in the dead of night. The whole time, Isasha had trotted at Finn’s heel, the perfect amount of space between them that Finn never tripped or stumbled over her, even when he had to jump unexpectedly out of sight of a Trooper patrol.

It’s like she has a sixth sense, attuned specifically to Finn. That thought scares him a lot less than the realization that he also has a sense attuned specifically to _her_.

Distance has muted the bond between them, Finn knows now. Everything the First Order ever taught him about dæmons isn’t wrong, per say, but. Incomplete. He’d thought, after learning so much from Nataaria and Kazmiir and Rey and Poe, that he knew what had been taken away from him. He’d thought wrong; it’s so much _more_. Finn can feel Isasha’s very breathing like it’s in his own lungs, can feel her flickering nuanced emotions even if he can’t always identify what they are.

 _That’s good_ , Isasha tells him, eyes still locked on Kylo Ren far below. Her ears are pinned tight to her skull and her tail lashes the air. _They have not torn the bond between us. Only stretched it._

 _If you stretch something far enough, eventually it will break_ , Finn says worriedly. His fingers clench around the blaster still in his hand, itching to shoot the Knight of Ren in the head and leave this place. He was the best marksman in his platoon, he could make the shot easily. But the crackly red beam of Kylo’s lightsaber is still held between him and Han, and he’s too unfamiliar with the weapon to account for its reaction.

Isasha leans against his ankle, warm through the cloth of his pants. _Who says they’ll get the opportunity to try again?_ she murmurs. Her utter confidence is reassuring.

“Ben, please,” Han says, on the catwalk spanning the length of the hangar. His voice is barely loud enough to make out the words. The influx of light behind them dims.

At his side, Rey gasps. “Oh,” she murmurs, Kazmiir’s accompanying hum edging high-pitched and sour. “Oh no.”

“What?” Finn says, wild.

The answer comes not in words but in the slash of liquid light; Kylo tightens his grip on his ‘saber and drives it into Han’s chest at the same time his ungainly dæmon swoops forward and plucks Caritia off the catwalk. He bats his larger set of wings unevenly, struggling to stay aloft in the cavernous open space of the hangar.

Caritia is wild, writhing, howling out for Han. She tries to sink her claws into Kylo’s dæmon, nearly breaks her own neck trying to run the reptavian through with her horns. At first, Finn thinks his eyes are playing a trick on him—with every second that passes, Caritia looks a little weaker, a little less solid.

He fumbles Maz’s alethiometer glasses out of a pocket, hoping they can tell him what’s happening, but the little dials just spin uselessly.

On the catwalk, Han is gasping around the beam of light still plunged through his chest. He mumbles something, making Kylo’s face contort in fear and rage, and one of his hands comes up to caress the Knight’s face. His other reaches out into the empty space of the hangar, reaches for Caritia, even as he topples over the side of the catwalk.

Han falls. By the time his body hits the hangar floor, too many floors below them, Caritia has slipped out of the other dæmon’s grasp. She…unravels, is the only word Finn can think of, simply bursts apart at the seams and disappears in a flicker of golden light.

Chewbacca roars, rending the silence with shots from his bowcaster. He seems to be aiming solely at Kylo, not at the reptavian dæmon that had separated Han and Caritia so cruelly in their final moments, and a couple of the shots connect. Kylo Ren stumbles to his knees on the catwalk, snarling at them, ‘saber still alight with crackling red plasma.

Finn’s blaster aims itself at Kylo’s dæmon. Next to him Kazmiir is hissing violently, at his feet Isasha is coiled violence waiting to be unleashed. Rey is very, very still. The solemnity is painted on her face like a mask.

Finn fires one shot.

The reptavian dæmon hisses malevolently up at them, one of his smaller wings hanging limp. The larger set had frozen up when Finn’s shot connected, causing the dæmon to drop several dozen feet in the air, but now he struggles back up to the catwalk and Kylo’s side.

Taking aim a second time, Finn is startled when a hand on his arm tugs him away from the railing. “Come on!” Rey shouts, wrapped in Finn’s jacket against the cold, Kazmiir draped around her shoulders like a shawl. She points down below them, where two squadrons of Stormtroopers are streaming into the hangar, and to where Chewie is already fighting his way out into the snow. “We have to go!”

 _No_ , Finn wants to say. _No, he has to pay._ But the words are caught in his throat—he doesn’t want to kill anyone, not even Kylo Ren, that’s what got him into this mess in the first place—and the planet is shaking under their feet. Abruptly, he remembers the mission they’d been sent on, the base they’re trying to destroy. As they speak, there is a fleet of X-Wings making a bombing run against the thermal oscillator.

Somewhere in the depths of Starkiller, there is a deafening boom.

Isasha shoves her head into the back of Finn’s knees, nearly sending him to the floor. _It’s time, Finn_ , she insists. _The planet is dying._

A blaster shot ricochets above all of their heads, sparks showering down on them. Kylo Ren is shouting orders to the Troopers, nearly hysterical now. Finn has spent his life being groomed to understand battle strategy and tactics like he knows his own body; the word ‘retreat’ is foreign to him but not the concept behind it.

Finn breathes out, meets Rey’s eyes and is comforted by the storm of emotions he finds there. It looks terrifying, and complicated, and similar to his.

They make a run for the _Falcon_.

 

\--

 

Finn doesn’t know how far they get before Kylo catches up to them, but they have to be most of the way back to the _Falcon_. He’d scooped Isasha up into his arms a hundred feet outside the base, despite her protestations, because she was having trouble keeping up in the deep snow and he could _feel_ how much the cold was hurting her.

Rey’s relying on him for direction, because she has no idea where they’d landed the _Falcon_. But everything looks different in the dark, this system’s sun gone out almost entirely, and all he can do is pray that they find it soon.

The feeling of Isasha going stiff in his arms gives Finn pause. He’s glad for it, a second later, when Kylo Ren stumbles out of the treeline.

Kylo’s enormous reptavian dæmon snarls at them, perched vertically against the side of a tree. His upper right wing is still useless; Finn smiles viciously at the proof of his marksmanship. Now that they’re closer it’s obvious that Kylo’s dæmon is native to a desert climate and thus poorly suited to the snow. Too big to huddle with his human for warmth and unable to regulate his own body heat, it’s a wonder the dæmon followed Kylo into the snow at all.

“We’re not done yet,” Kylo growls. His dark robes conceal any potential bloodstains, but his limping gait and pain-drawn face tell Finn that at least one of Chewie’s shots connected. The thought fills him with grim satisfaction.

 _Good_ , Isasha says, her lovely voice thick with loathing. _Let him bleed. Just like he made us bleed._

 _Wait_ , Finn tells her. Their time will come. They just have to be patient.

Kazmiir’s head pokes out of Rey’s shirt, the milky scales around his eyes catching the scant light. “You’re a monster,” Rey says tightly.

“It’s just us now,” Kylo says, low and hypnotic. His eyes are manic; his dæmon thumps ungainly wings against the tree bark and screeches at them. “Han Solo can’t save you.”

Before Finn can try to figure out what _that_ means, Rey seizes the blaster out of his hands. Her fingers brush his, gentle and reassuring, and then she’s firing two shots into Kylo Ren’s face.

They don’t connect, of course. Kylo uses the Force to bat them away into the snow, fizzling out, and then he lashes out in Rey’s direction. There’s a wave of _something_ that rushes past Finn, solid and unyielding.

Rey gets flung backwards into the air. She slams into a tree trunk and slumps to the snow, unmoving.

“Rey?” Finn panics, rushing to her side. Isasha leaps out of his arms when he reaches her, circling Rey’s prone form and sniffing cautiously at the lump of scales pinned under her back. He pulls her crumpled form into his arms, cradling her head tenderly. The rise and fall of her chest is shallow, but present. Her eyelids brush wetly against her cheeks. “Rey? Oh god, Rey…”

 _They’re alive_ , Isasha notes, grasping Kazmiir in her jowls as gently as she can and tugging him free of the snow. She lays him over Rey’s chest, careful not to touch her, and skitters back to Finn’s side.

A looming darkness crackles behind him. The sound of Kylo’s lightsaber igniting again sends shivers of fear up Finn’s spine. “ _Traitor!”_ the Knight howls.

 _Stay with them,_ Finn instructs his dæmon. He’s only just found her, he won’t risk her life. Isasha nips at his fingers in protest but remains loyally at Rey’s side as Finn steps clear, drawing Kylo’s attention away from his vulnerable friends.

He has no idea what possesses him to take Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber and ignite it. Kylo Ren is a master swordsman; Finn’s lived under the threat of his reputation for years. Finn, who has fought with a lightsaber only once before and barely won, has no chance against a trained Force-user.

But he has to try.

He holds the ‘saber aloft, feeling the power humming through the blue blade. It calls to him.

Irrationally, the sight of the lightsaber infuriates Kylo. His eyes latch onto it and do not move. “That lightsaber,” he rasps. “It belongs to me.” His free hand stretches in Finn’s direction, clawed, like he can just reach out and take Finn’s weapon.

He can’t let that happen. Finn is all that’s standing between Rey and Kazmiir and certain death. He has to give them a chance to wake up, to get away, to _live._

“Come and get it,” he says, injecting his voice with confidence he does not feel. He lunges forward with a bellow, hoping to catch Kylo off guard by attacking first.

It’s immediately apparent that Finn is hopelessly outclassed—he can barely parry and deflect the Knight’s powerful swings, let alone land a retaliatory strike—but he grits his teeth. Finn was top of his squadron in all their fields of training, including weapons combat. He trained extensively with riot batons in the Academy. Lightsaber fighting is not so very different from that.

Kylo knocks him on his ass in the snow and breaks away, thumping a fist against his bleeding gut wound while Finn scrambles to his feet. His dæmon croaks, mocking Finn without words.

Finn reconsiders his strategy in the brief reprieve. He cannot best Kylo with technique, that much is clear. But Finn has a lifetime of Stormtrooper training on his side; that training has prepared him for much worse things than taking on a powerful Force-user in single combat. Maybe he can wear the Knight down with brute force?

They lock ‘sabers again, red crackling and spitting against blue, and again. This time, Kylo pins him against a tree and uses his greater height to leverage the weight of the plasma blades against Finn. The beams slip closer and closer to him, despite his efforts, and the heat is unbearable.

When one of the crossguard vents slices into his shoulder, the pain is excruciating. It’s nothing he’s ever felt before, like he’s being burnt and stabbed all at once. It’s a hundred times worse than anything he felt as feedback from Isasha.

Finn screams.

When Kylo backs away instead of pressing his advantage further, Finn doesn’t realize why until after he’s blinked the streaks of pain from the backs of his eyelids. _Isasha, what are you doing?_ he mumbles.

His dæmon is not at Rey’s side, where he’d left her. His dæmon has her sharp teeth clenched on an injured scaly wing, dragging Kylo’s dæmon down into the snow with a fierce shake of her head. The enormous creature bats at Isasha with his ungainly wings and flared tail, trying to shake her loose.

“Serdes!” Kylo snarls. Forgetting Finn, he stomps in the direction of their writhing dæmons, his intentions clear.

Terror makes him bold, makes him forget everything else but making Kylo _stop_. Finn engages the Knight again, barely feeling the flickers of pain when Kylo’s Serdes strikes one of Isasha’s prior wounds. This, too, he has over Kylo Ren.

Kylo’s at a disadvantage now, distracted by every phantom lash of Isasha’s tail or swipe of her claws against his Serdes’ scaled skin, weakened by the encroaching cold in a way that Finn isn’t. He lands a lucky hit, his lightsaber slashing deep into Kylo’s shoulder.

There’s no time to celebrate the victory, though.

Serdes finally succeeds in knocking Isasha loose, thumping her soundly with his tail as he takes to the air. The blow dazes them both, breaking Finn’s concentration long enough for Kylo Ren to execute a fancy move and send Finn’s lightsaber into a snowdrift. _Oh no,_ he has time to think, because a hot wave of the Force spins him around like a top and.

Finn’s mind goes white with pain. It feels like his back is on fire, like the flesh has been seared from his bones. He crumples to the snow, all his muscles slack with pain. He does not feel the cold.

 _Isasha,_ he says. Then, louder, “Isasha.” He has to force his tongue to wrap clumsily around the syllables.

Nothing.

The snow dampens all sound in the forest. Distantly, he can hear the rumble of the planet’s core far, far below. Starkiller is overheating, cracking apart from the inside. _Poe’s fleet of X-Wings did it_ , he thinks, and the sheer relief of that realization is enough to make him black out for a minute.

When he swims back to consciousness, lightsabers are humming again. Blue and red light swings in vivid streaks through the dark. “Rey,” he mumbles, relieved. She’s okay. She can fight. She’ll save them all.

Something warm licks at his fingertips, curls up in the space between his side and his outstretched arm. _That’s right, Finn, she’s got this. You just rest,_ Isasha says. The undercurrent of worry in her voice makes him stir, wondering what’s wrong. But she rests her muzzle on his shoulderblade, little growls vibrating through the connection between them, and Finn knows she will watch over him.

Finn hopes Rey kicks Kylo’s ass. He assumes Isasha already took care of thrashing Kylo’s dæmon.

 _Rest,_ Isasha purrs.

His vision fades out again, numb with pain and cold.


	5. epilogue

 

(One Month Later)

 

 

Finn wakes up to warmth and light and a comfortable weight on his chest. He is, for the first time in as long as he can possibly remember, entirely without pain. A lingering stiffness in his muscles and the hazy detachment of drugs cycling out of his bloodstream are the only things to tell him how long he’s been out of things.

Well, that and the feeling that something died in his mouth.

He peels his eyelids open with great force. A pair of black eyes stares back at him, set in a pointed canine face. Finn’s daemon is curled into a loose ball across his chest, tail flicking lazily along the sheets and ears pricked forward intently.

 _Oh,_ he says.

Isasha licks his nose affectionately. _Hello again,_ she whispers. Her voice is the loveliest thing Finn’s ever heard.

A low rumbling snore cuts through the quiet. When Finn convinces his head to turn far enough to look, Rey and Poe are passed out on a pair of uncomfortable-looking chairs at his bedside. Poe’s head is craned back to rest against the medcenter’s white wall at an ache-inducing angle, probably the cause of the snoring, and his orange flight suit jacket is tied around his waist. Rey’s curled up on top of her chair, slumped against Poe’s shoulder and snuffling quietly.

 _Totally adorable_ , Finn thinks fondly, and a tiny grin tugs at the corners of his mouth.

Isasha follows his gaze, chuffing at Finn’s friends, and then directs his attention to the side of the bed with a flick of her long tail. For the first time he becomes aware of a second weight, nestled in the gap between Finn’s arm and his side, much smaller than Isasha’s warm bulk.

Nataaria and Kazmiir.

He can’t rightly distinguish where one dæmon starts and the other ends, they’re curled so tightly together. Kazmiir’s feathers slip and flow against Nataaria’s soft gray fur, a flash of sand-colored scales peeking through here and there, and both are as deeply asleep as their humans. The sight makes Finn’s tiny grin grow into a proper smile.

 _Hopeless, the lot of them_ , Isasha grumbles, but when Finn checks there’s only affection in her canine face. He reaches up with his free hand to brush against her side, tentative, and his dæmon purrs.

He settles deeper into his pillow. Eventually, a nurse will come in to check his injuries. Eventually, Rey and Poe will wake and somebody will explain to him how they got off of Starkiller. For now, though. For now, Finn’s perfectly happy to bask in the quiet, surrounded by the people he adores most in the galaxy. _Give them time,_ he tells Isasha. _They’ll figure it out. I did, after all._

**Author's Note:**

> Finn—Isasha (protector of humanity); dwarf vornskr, a force-sensitive nocturnal canine predator native to Myrkr. leanly muscled with an angular face and a whip-like tail.  
> Rey—Kazmiir (keeper or destroyer of peace); song serpent, a desert snake native to Proxima Dibal. has a combination of sand-colored scales and iridescent feathers to protect vibrating respiratory membranes.  
> Poe—Nataaria (birthday of Christ); stonebat, mottled gray furred flying insectivore native to Yavin IV.  
> Han Solo—Caritia (loving, gracious); kima, an herbivorous feline native to Talus in the Correllian system. gray furred with 2 backwards facing horns and a mane.  
> Chewbacca—Wookies do not have dæmons. They forge tools or weapons out of sky iron, infusing the metal with their souls, akin to the panserbjørne of the HDM books. In Chewie’s case, his bowcaster.  
> Leia Organa—Trisales (filled with sadness); kalidor, an avian predator native to Davnar II. Revered by some as the most perfect flying creature in the galaxy.  
> Kylo Ren--Serdes (one who burns); urusai, a reptavian scavenger with blue and yellow scales and a meter long wingspan, native to Tatooine.  
> General Hux--Maresse (rendered to Mars, warlike); korrina, tiger-dog native to Endor, fierce pack hunter. 
> 
>  
> 
> ***names are as close as i can figure to the true meaning, being star wars-ified and all. all of these forms have been pulled straight from the star wars wiki; go take a look if you need a better visual! this list will be updated as more daemons are introduced, so stay tuned! if you liked my work and wanna see more, or you just wanna flail about tfa with me, come say hello over on [tumblr!](http://bogwitches.tumblr.com/)


End file.
